mfdip-2004nor02Interview with Donald R. Norland The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and TrainingSelected and converted.American Memory, Library of Congress

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02/01/200602/01/20060001

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project

AMBASSADOR DONALD R. NORLAND

Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy

Initial interview date: December 15, 1992

Copyright 1998 ADST

Q: I wonder if you could tell me a bit about your background: when you were born, where you grew up and were educated, and a little about your family?

NORLAND: Well I'm a Midwesterner. I was born in Iowa in the town of Laurens, in northwest Iowa, Pocahontas County. My father was there as superintendent of schools. He was an educator. But he had been born in Iowa. My mother is also an Iowan. All four of my grandparents came from Norway. Northern Iowa was the part of the world that I grew up in and still know well because I have two brothers who are still in that part of the world. Laurens was a very small, 1,700 person community. I was fortunate in that I had the intellectual influence in my family that comes from having a professional educator father. He attended a little school called Waldorf, in Forest City, Iowa, on successive winters. He farmed during the spring and summer and early fall. He was the only son with six sisters. The sisters, in typical early 20th-century fashion, insisted that he be the one who went to college. So he went to Waldorf, finished high school there, and then went on to Iowa State University, where he got a degree in agricultural education. Henry Wallace was at Iowa State at the time. So my father was not just a farmer; he combined the intellectual and the practical.

My grandfather on my mother's side was at one time a very wealthy landowner. But he speculated; he borrowed using some farms to buy others, and then lost all but a couple of them. During that heyday, my father bought a farm from him, in northern Iowa, Worth County; we still have that 160-acre farm. We managed to save it. It's still in the family, and I actually own some acres there.

But the family left Laurens and went to Cedar Falls, Iowa. There was a college there called Iowa State Teachers' College at the time; it's now University of Northern Iowa. My father taught for a couple of years while a professor went on sabbatical. And then he went back to the farm that he had purchased in northern Iowa near Kensett, Iowa. I lived on that farm in northern Iowa for five early years.

Q: You were born when?

0002

NORLAND: In June of 1924. So from about '26 until '31, we lived on the farm.

The Depression hit, and my father couldn't make a good living by farming (and by this time there were five of us in the family), so he returned to Laurens to resume his duties as the superintendent of schools. He was very popular, I think it's not unfair to say. So I had eight years, from '31 to '39, living in Laurens.

As a matter of fact, I went back to the 50th high school reunion although I didn't graduate from there. In '39, things having improved, my father, having done his stint in educating, returned to the farm near Kensett, Iowa. So from '39 to '41, I finished high school in the town of Kensett, named for a painter, John Kensett, I believe. It was a poor school. There were 25 in the graduating class, and it was really an improvised arrangement—a tiny little gymnasium, no football team, all the things that I'd wanted. I graduated from there in 1941.

That fall, what more natural thing to do than to go to the school where my father had taught and my mother had gone to school, Iowa State Teachers' College. So I went to college beginning in September '41. Pearl Harbor was bombed that fall. And in 1943, like so many others (I was 19 and I knew the time was coming) I joined the U.S. Navy. And that began the period of detachment from my roots, you might say.

Q: For so many. World War II had such a profound influence on our whole generation, and the generation later, of the Foreign Service.

NORLAND: Exactly.

Q: It got us out of the small towns.

NORLAND: How true! While in Laurens, I had gotten interested in something which one could never dream would play an important role in my life—the sport of football. I became a lineman. (I was big enough then; I weighed about 40 pounds more than I do now.) And when I got into the Navy V-12 program at Northwest Missouri State Teachers's College (Maryville, Missouri), I went out for the football team. In May of 1944, having spent eight months at this pre-midshipman training at Maryville and several months at Asbury Park, N.J., I was sent to Cornell, where I got my ensign's commission in September of '44. And then, in a great bit of luck, I qualified for PT Boats; people thought being a football player gave you a special ability to resist the particular kind of beating you take in PTs.

Q: PT means a small motor boat...

0003

NORLAND: Patrol torpedo boat. As a matter of fact, this will remind you of what they were like. I brought this...

Q: Oh, yes. We have a picture here of these. If one wants to get a feel for this, a researcher can look at the photo of John F. Kennedy.

NORLAND: That recalls one of the first things that activated my sense of history. I was in the same PT squadron as John F. Kennedy but he had already been to the South Pacific and become something of a hero, and had returned to the training base at Melville, Rhode Island. I met him on a pier at Melville. This is a picture (I'm in the front row there somewhere) of the class I graduated with. He's not there, but I have that picture because it was about that time that I met him. It was an event.

I played football at Melville. And at the end of the season...I shouldn't say it that way, but we had a base commander who thought that a football team was very important for morale and esprit de corps, so I did not get sent to the Pacific until the football season was over. That was January of '45.

Q: This was very, very common, particularly in the Navy. Good boxers, good football teams, these were very, very important.

NORLAND: For morale. Anyway, this was Commander David I. Walsh III. Since you're from the East, you'll remember that David I. Walsh was the son of a senior senator from Massachusetts. So he had real clout.

Q: Oh, yes.

NORLAND: I was sent to the Pacific. After a thirty-day troop transport experience, I arrived in Leyte Gulf in late January 1945. Again, this was four months after the Leyte invasion, but MacArthur's tracks were still evident. And we moved around. Just picking up this folder, I came across a picture of the areas where, in convoy, my squadron, Squadron 7, went from Leyte Gulf around the southern tip of Cebu and to the island of Panay, where I participated in invasions—several, because this was a time of so-called island hopping. MacArthur was the commander in charge. Somewhere I have a picture of MacArthur visiting our PT boat.

0004

Because I was healthy (those Norwegian roots are not unimportant), I ended up at age 20 being in command of a PT boat on several daylight raids, which were considered to be very tricky. Normally one patrolled at night and tried, with radar, to identify barges or other Japanese navy ships. We were trying to draw them out. I was in charge of a PT boat on several raids in Northern Samar Island, just across from Panay if you recall the geography of the Philippines. And so I had several maturing experiences before the age of 21.

Q: Oh, yes.

NORLAND: We also conducted night raids, but it happened that I was in command on daylight runs. I can remember being shot at. From a distance, I could see tracers coming toward me. I can't say that I participated in land combat, but that was a very maturing experience.

As a matter of fact, I was the youngest person on that PT boat. The enlisted personnel all happened to be older. So I matured.

At the end of the war, I had the experience of being on one of two PT boats selected to go around with a Japanese lieutenant, a Japanese interpreter and an orderly to various smaller islands in the Philippines—Romblon, for example. We would come to a dock, the Japanese officer, the interpreter and an American Army lieutenant would go into the interior of the island with a bullhorn to announce that the war was over. This was September of 1945.

Q: The war had ended in August.

NORLAND: August 8th, 1945. And that gave me an opportunity, for about a week, to associate with Japanese. The Japanese interpreter, by the way, had been a graduate of Columbia University. He was very intelligent. This experience had the effect of putting the war in perspective, and I've never been terribly troubled since by the fact that the Japanese had shot at me and had caused us a lot of grief at Pearl Harbor. I realized that this was a terrible time and that Japan had an incredibly different civilizational legacy but that it would be overcome by education and leadership.

I left the PT boats about this time (October 1945) as our PT boat was one of dozens put in mothballs on the Island of Samar.

Q: Mothballs meaning...

0005

NORLAND: Being pulled up a river, tied up along with others, stripped of all the armaments, and left to rot. In some cases they were burned, I learned later. But they were kept there provisionally with the idea that they might possibly be used again.

I was taken off the PT boat and shipped off to minesweeper duty. This can be a long story; I'll shorten it by saying that we went to Guam to pick up the minesweeper—it wasn't there. I rode an aircraft carrier to Okinawa—the minesweeper (AM125) was not there. While in Okinawa in November 1945, Walt McNiff, another fellow who'd been on PTs, and I convinced the Air Force traffic controller that our ship was in Shanghai. We had no evidence on which to base this, but we said to hell with staying in Okinawa for a long period; we wanted to see another part of the world. And we got orders to fly to Shanghai.

We arrived there on the last day of November 1945. There was no pay station. We were attached to what was called the Glen Line building but were billeted at the Shanghai American School. I know a lot of our China colleagues went to school there. So we settled in to wait, broke but living an extraordinary adventure.

I became friendly with a Frenchman who had been assistant chief of police in the French quarter. He heard of my plight (and that of my friend), took pity on us and loaned us money. Can you believe it? To me it was phenomenal that a man would loan us money to live. He also took us to his home and fed us. At that point, I took a particular interest in the French language. He had a ten-year old daughter who thought Americans were great. And so I began a study of the French language in earnest.

To our shock and surprise, however, on about the 2nd of January 1946, our minesweeper arrived. I couldn't believe it. So I became an officer on a minesweeper. We went out of Shanghai, up the Huangpu River to Sasebo, Japan, which was devastated. We were assigned to conduct minesweeping operations in the Tsushima Straits, which we did during February and early March 1946. That was a miserable experience. If you know that part of the world, it's raw weather. It was not fun. But it was interesting.

Then we were asked to tow a ship back to Guam, and from Guam my ship was returned to Shanghai, in April of '46. Our orders were to turn it over to the Chinese Maritime Customs. As executive officer, my job was to literally count every object on the ship, from silverware to radar, and get a Chinese officer to sign for it. It took two or three months in Shanghai to get that job done.

0006

During this time, I saw my French friend again and was able to repay him, because instead of turning over goods like flour, rice and sugar (which I knew would not remain on the ship, it would probably be sold on the black market; because I was also a Shore Patrol officer, and I could see things being sold on the streets) I got a truck and took them to my French friend—a hundred pounds of rice, probably an equivalent amount of sugar. He was grateful and it turned out to be an important event in my life.

Like many other Westerners, he had to leave Shanghai at about that time, because of the threat from the Communists. He went to Nice and bought a small hotel.

I shipped back to the United States in June of 1946, was demobilized and went to the University of Minnesota. Why? Because one of the people with whom I'd played football at Melville was Bud Svensen, an ex-All American, who talked to Bernie Berman, the coach. Svenson said he had “a young recruit here from Iowa, who seems to be pretty tough, and can help your athletic program.” So I went to the University of Minnesota largely for that reason. I not only played football, I also wrestled. And I stayed at the University of Minnesota from '46 through '48 continuously—summer school included, participating in athletics in the fall and winter while working. I was also on the debating team. I was beginning to enjoy it, reveling in this civilian atmosphere. And the mayor of the city was Hubert Humphrey.

Q: Oh, yes, later vice president of the United States, a very famous liberal senator, a major political figure.

NORLAND: A major proponent of civil rights, he was the first to develop a city civil rights program. And he was an inspiration to a lot of people, including people who are quite well known today. Max Kampelman, for example, ambassador in charge of arms control, was my second college advisor. The first was a man named Evron Kirkpatrick, who married a woman well known at Georgetown University, Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Q: Oh, yes, yes.

NORLAND: So I was in that Minnesota political environment. But I had to work, because a three-year (military) hiatus does not help your intellectual capacity.

Q: I did not serve in World War II; I got the Korean War. But it was a time when everybody was older and more serious. It was a very serious time.

NORLAND: Exactly.

0007Q: You had to make up for time.

NORLAND: You had that feeling, that you had to move quickly. Instead of the usual fifteen hours, I was taking twenty hours of course work, covering the spectrum. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do.

After having studied consecutively for two years, i.e. through the summer of '48, I felt I needed a break. My French friend from Shanghai who had returned to France and bought a hotel in Nice, invited me to come over there to stay with him and his family. I was at the stage where I'd gotten a B.A. and I needed a thesis topic, so I thought I would do a thesis on French politics.

Another Navy friend, well connected in the Greek shipping industry, got me a job as the librarian on a Greek (it was actually a Canadian) tramp steamer. I was to be paid $30 for my services during the trip. I went to New York in June of 1946 and caught the steamer. We went to La Guaira, Venezuela, to pick up crude oil, then across the ocean to Martigues, France, where I got off the ship and went to Nice to see my friend.

I spent from July of '48 through October living in Nice with the family that still felt gratitude for the supplies I gave them at a crucial time. I studied French on my own, using Le Monde, a dictionary and discussions with people. I took a trip around Europe in the course of which I passed through Grenoble, France. When I got back, my friend, whose name was Roger said, “You should really spend more time here. Why not perfect your French? And the best place to do it is Grenoble.” So I arranged to have my GI Bill transferred to Grenoble.

Q: The GI Bill was a government payment of tuition to veterans.

NORLAND: That's right, tuition and a small stipend that was, at that time, enough to live on in France. So from November of '48 through April of '49, I studied at the University of Grenoble. And that was a critical time, because French is important for diplomatic service. I learned French to the point I was comfortable with it. I stayed until April, 1949 and then returned to the University of Minnesota.

My Master's thesis was entitled “The Politics of the Third Force in France.” At the time, the French were trying to find a middle ground between the Communists, on the one hand, and the Gaullists on the other. There was this attempt to develop a coalition, a middle-of-the-road party. The thesis was a hundred and some pages. This was a big adventure since I had not previously had such a requirement.

0008

Having finished the thesis, I scouted around for a job. And the first job that appeared was (lo and behold!) an offer to be an instructor at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls where I had gone to school for two years and where my parents had lived. So I taught political science and history for two years. A great learning experience. Teaching required a wide mastery of your field. I taught what amounted to Constitutional law (I'd had an excellent professor of Constitutional law at Minnesota), and also American History, a course called Contemporary Affairs and comparative governments, because I'd been to France and studied a bit in that part of the world.

In 1951, after two years, I had to make up my mind whether I was going to get a Ph.D., teach, or whatever. Meanwhile I'd heard about the Foreign Service while in Shanghai, while on shore patrol, I heard about a person called a consul. And I heard that the British were very effective in getting their sailors out of jail, and we were less effective, and it was the effectiveness of the consul that made the difference. I was not able to verify exactly what the British did.

But I took the exam. It was then a three-day examination.

Q: It was actually three and a half days.

NORLAND: That's right. And there was a long language aspect to it.

Earlier in 1951 I had applied to a number of universities and was accepted at Michigan. So I went to Michigan in the fall and was a teaching assistant there. Met a lot of good people and finished the course work for a Ph.D. I was scouting around for a thesis topic and had chosen diplomatic privileges and immunities, because of this interest in consular work. I was, by this time, pointing in the direction of international affairs as a vocation.

I passed the written exam in '52 and was invited to Washington to take the oral. I was accepted and sworn into the Foreign Service in July of 1952. As a matter of fact, our class just had its 40th reunion. It was a very good group. John Anderson, the 1980 presidential candidate, was one of our number. One of my classmates took me on a blind date with him in late August or September of 1952, and I met a charming woman who became my wife.

Q: Well, tell me a little about the class. How did you and they look at the world and the United States, and how was your training, and how did you look upon a career at that time?

NORLAND: Well, that's interesting, because we did spend a certain amount of time, in the course of our reunion, on the training. And I can tell you that we had our biggest laughs when we looked over the syllabus for our training course. It was largely theory. There was a lot of protocol, a lot about the social behavior, which you can imagine was very different.

0009

Q: It played such a small role in our business.

NORLAND: Now it seems to play an even smaller role. For example, one of the major subjects which we discussed in 1952 was linguistics and language. We had a man, and I think his name was Henry Lee Smith...

Q: Huxie Smith.

NORLAND: He would listen to you talk for a few minutes and then tell you where you were from, your linguistic influences. Do you remember him?

Q: Yes, oh, yes. Fascinating.

NORLAND: It was fascinating indeed. We also had lectures about the role of the United States in the world.

We didn't do much on the specifics of international organization or international law, something I was interested in. We didn't focus on administration. We didn't practice writing requirements as they do today. And we didn't “bond” in the way that they now do. Young officers spend a lot of time in retreats “bonding.” We got along very well. Only a couple of us were married with the special schedule that entails.

We were certainly aware of the fact that the United States played a key role in the world. And we were all anxious to join in the anti-Communist struggle. I don't think there was anyone who didn't realize this was a very serious undertaking, that we were going to be spending a great deal of time fashioning ways of countering Communist influence.

For example, we traveled to New York, and the person who briefed us there was Bertram Wolfe. Bertram Wolfe had been a Communist who'd gone to Mexico, written about Communism, was a friend of Diego Rivera, who was a Communist. Wolfe then escaped the Communist clutches and wrote a book called “Three Who Made a Revolution.” It was a classic. I had read the book but to be briefed by Bertram Wolfe was an experience. He was actually a very unassuming guy, unmistakably anti-Communist, and doing everything he could to counter it. I think he was a consultant for the VOA at the time. He was certainly a source of motivation.

Another phenomenon of that time really bothered us, namely McCarthyism.

0010Q: Could you explain? After all, here you were, I assume practically all of you were military veterans. Your patriotism was not up for question or anything else. You weren't artsy fartsy college liberals or something like that. And then, to have this thing descend on the Foreign Service. And brand-new. How did this react on you all?

NORLAND: I looked upon it as a real challenge. I defied the McCarthyist idea. I had done so while teaching, by the way; I had given college lectures, to the point that I antagonized a lot of people, saying that McCarthy was a fraud. And when I got into the Foreign Service (luckily I suppose), I didn't change my thinking that he was a menace. I couldn't understand why the American public was so slow to react. There was a momentum that was sweeping away even the General Eisenhowers of the world. Remember, he refused to defend General Marshall publicly. It was a terrible thing, and we talked about this, and we worried about the influence this would have. It was eroding morale. There were people who were being hurt. And people who were taking positions of responsibility, like Scott McLeod, were known henchmen. (He was in charge of security.) So it was a time of great concern.

Q: Were you getting the feeling, gee, you better watch out what you report? How was this affecting you?

NORLAND: I would not say that we were affected in that way. There was a kind of underlying defiance, a feeling that this man McCarthy and his ideas could not prevail, because there was no substance to it. And I know, privately, we were absolutely convinced this could not last. But how you go about combating it—only in little ways. We probably wrote letters, maybe even a petition, to get people to stand up more strongly. No one can remember what we actually did but I had the feeling that it was terribly wrong. We were, as you say, mature people and veterans. I think the average age of the class was 29 or 30; I was 28.

And, worse, my first assignment was Morocco. To pursue this McCarthy business, my first duties were as assistant public affairs officer. The public affairs officer soon left, and while I was in charge the team of Cohn and Schine made a trip to Europe and threatened to come to Morocco. I got a telegram saying that, in anticipation of their visit, I should remove from the shelves of the library all books by Dashiell Hammett, the murder mystery writer, and a couple of other names.

Q: Lillian Hellman.

NORLAND: Right. It was unbelievable—in America.

0011Q: For somebody looking at this period, this trip of Cohn and Schine was the greatest embarrassment that could have happened.

NORLAND: Indeed.

Q: These were two assistants of his that sort of flitted around. I hate to use the term, but they were just absolutely animals, being unintellectual and having a wonderful time giving a terrible name to the United States. They were so-called “investigating” books, and they would run around ripping books off shelves.

NORLAND: That's right. And it had further personal consequence in that I was scheduled for home leave after two years. I had arrived in Morocco in December of 1952. 1954 came, and the Department decided not to give us home leave, for fear that, once we returned to Washington our positions would be abolished and there would be an opportunity for the McCarthyists to talk to us, to conduct investigations. I mean, I don't know what all was feared. But it was a ridiculous episode.

Q: Well, let's go back to the time you were there. I came in in 1955, and I had very much the impression, as I think most of my class did, that you really couldn't trust the Secretary of State. Alger Hiss and that whole case. I had no doubt about his guilt, as leaking documents to the...I got the feeling that my superiors would not back me up. One had the feeling that Dean Acheson was a solid person, but that Dulles was not, as far as standing up for the Foreign Service.

NORLAND: That is certainly true. And I developed a dislike of Dulles even before I saw him. I saw him a couple of times and actually had dealings once. But Dulles could subordinate what I thought was his natural human and democratic instinct and bow down to this man McCarthy. And when Dulles succeeded in getting rid of a number of people and letting the security people have their way, obviously acquiescing in a number of things that McCarthy was doing, it made things worse. I mean, it was not a good time to be in the Foreign Service.

Q: But did this not turn anybody off?

NORLAND: Oh, yes, I think it did. I don't think any of our group actually resigned as a result of it, but they certainly developed an active dislike for that particular era and that particular regime. I don't know anyone who looks back fondly at John Foster Dulles's term as Secretary of State. I did return to the Department and was working there while he was going around developing the SEATOs and the CENTOs, these anti-Communist alliances, and calling nonalignment immoral. And that showed that he was catering to influences that were not well grounded in reality, and that he didn't understand the non-industrialized world.

0012

Q: Your first job, you went straight from training to Rabat, where you served from '52 to '56.

NORLAND: That's right. I was supposed to come home on home leave in '54, but they were afraid, so I stayed on and on, and finally left in January of '56, having spent more than three years at my first post.

Q: What was the situation in Morocco when you went there in '52?

NORLAND: This was a fascinating period. Let me give you a quick overview of the '52 to '60 period. In the course of those years, I spent five years abroad under colonial regimes. The only way to understand what was going on in Morocco at that time, and what was going on in Ivory Coast later, was to see that the colonial power was determined to retain its status and maintain its citizens in positions of power and responsibility. It was another mentality. And we're only talking forty years ago. But in Morocco the atmosphere was dominated by the French, in the person of the French resident general sitting in the highest position of authority, with the Moroccan monarchy reduced considerably in stature by the way the French treated him, King Mohammed V. (He was then known as Sultan Mohammed V.)

At that same time, there was percolating in the body politic of Morocco the effects of what an American president had done in 1942. You remember President Roosevelt had met with the Sultan after the Casablanca Conference. He told the Sultan that he would do nothing to facilitate continued French colonialism in the world. And that applied specifically to Morocco.

Roosevelt's word had given rise to feelings of independence, which were focused in the Independence Movement (in Arabic the word is Istiqlal). Istiqlal was banned by the French, it was anathema to the authorities and, of course, it was gaining ground rapidly among Moroccans.

So you had this implacable confrontation between the French on the one hand, with their extraordinary armed forces...I became quite well acquainted with G�n�ral Duval, who was the head of those armed forces for much of the time that I was there...and the Moroccan people. The French armed forces controlled the city, patrolling where necessary. They had spies; they had their ways of exercising authority. And on the other hand, you had the Moroccans, who were quietly going about in their djellabas (long gowns).

The djellaba, in a sense, was a metaphor for their politics—a deceptively common outer garment able to conceal arms while they looked you in the eye and said, “I'm not doing anything wrong, I'm just trying to stay out of trouble,” then going behind the scenes and conducting what we today call terrorist attacks.

0013

One of my jobs, when I moved to the political section of the embassy, was to send in weekly reports of the number of arson cases, terrorist attacks, armed incidents, such as assaults on French authority by Moroccans.

My boss there, by the way, was a figure of great capacity and dimensions. I'm sure you've heard his name—Bill Porter. I'm terribly sorry he did not get his chance to do an oral history. Bill Porter was a man who understood the Moroccan mentality.

Q: He was what?

NORLAND: He became the consul general in the fall of '53. John Dorman had been the consul.

Q: In those days, we didn't have an ambassador because it wasn't...

NORLAND: It was not independent. We had a minister resident in Tangier. And those ministers were extraordinarily competent people. John Carter Vincent was one. And Joe Satterthwaite. And the reason those ministers were there was because they did not require Senate confirmation. John Carter Vincent was suspect because of his China policies.

Q: You're talking about the McCarthy period.

NORLAND: Yes, he was minister during the McCarthy period.

Q: So this is where you kind of...I won't say buried them, but kept them out of the line of fire.

NORLAND: That's true. And the ministers had very little to say about what we were doing in French Morocco.

Q: In Rabat, wasn't the system that Morocco was considered a separate country?

0014

NORLAND: Indeed it was. It was governed under the terms of the Treaty of F�s, which was agreed between Marshal Lyautey and the Moroccans in 1912. In a word, it provided that Morocco would be autonomous, except for defense and foreign affairs, which would be in the hands of the French. And, of course, the French expanded the authority granted them in that loophole (defense and foreign affairs), and literally ran the country. Their investments were the dynamism that enabled the country to be actually quite prosperous and economically interesting. The Moroccans have great tourist potential. One olive oil company, Huile Lesieur, for example, in Casablanca, was a major multinational, we would say today. But the French used Morocco as a kind of training ground for their military. And they were constantly trying to preempt prominent Moroccans and get them to front for their administration.

I was going to say, when Bill Porter and I would drive inland, to F�s, for example, we had to go through roadblocks. And roadblocks meant French military poking their guns inside the windows of the car until you showed them your papers, and then you'd go on. It was a case of strict military domination and not pretty.

Bill handled it very well. He got to know the successive residents general. There was Guillaume, Duval, Dubois, a former prefect of police in Paris, very prominent French politicians in positions of authority. But the Moroccans made their wishes known.

Let me offer one incident that will describe what it was like to live in that country. I was the lowest-ranking officer in the consulate general. Bill Porter, having spent a lot of time in the Middle East (his first post was Baghdad about '36; he went on to Lebanon and Cairo), understood the mentalities, studied Arabic, and knew that the future of the country was with the Moroccan independence movement. And we kept getting informal emissaries from King Mohammed V.

One man, named Sbihi, was one of these quiet Moroccans who would slip in the back door to talk, in anxious tones, to Bill Porter, leaning forward, telling him all the feelings at the palace, how the king wanted help, etc.

Q: This would be Mohammed V.

NORLAND: Mohammed V. We'll call him the king from now on because that's when he changed his name.

The king wanted to cause the Americans to understand that the independence movement would be friendly to us, that Moroccans were not anti-French, but this was the age of independence. They remembered what Roosevelt had said.

0015

Bill Porter would play the game absolutely straight and say, “Thank you very much. We know we are indeed a symbol of independence, of course. But at the moment, the French are the authority here, and we must work and try to negotiate something different.”

At one point, a young Moroccan named Douiri came to my house. He'd been educated in France at the �cole des Mines. He'd returned and he was the top-ranking working-level Moroccan official. (He's still a figure in Moroccan politics, although I'm told he's not well.) He came to me and he asked to talk. I reported this to Bill Porter, who somehow got the Department to agree to allow me to have a contact with this young Moroccan. It took about two meetings to determine that, instead of being what the French thought he was, namely a product of the French universities and someone who believed entirely in the French way of looking at things, Douiri was a member of Istiqlal. I then had an authorized contact with a member of Istiqlal.

Q: Just a bit about how we operated. Here we were, our oldest relationship with any country in the world was with Morocco, of all things. The French dominated it, but at the same time, legally, the situation wasn't quite that straightforward. You had this independent movement going on. How were you guided as far as contacts?

NORLAND: Well, we were passive; I never put out the word that I wanted to see Douiri. I was authorized to receive him in my house when he came around. So it was usually after dark, in the most imperceptible way, that he would somehow find his way to the house.

I should have mentioned, as part of this overall contact, something which I stress very much when I lecture on the subject. That is the fact that the United States was building five major air bases in Morocco at this time, three of which were already operational. And you know their purpose. Perhaps I should put it on the record: these were so-called recovery bases for American aircraft striking the USSR from bases in the Middle East...

Q: We're talking about the Soviet Union.

NORLAND: A strike against the Soviet Union. They would make their strike, possibly from the United States, and would stop in Morocco for refueling and recovery, as they say.

0016

And so this was a country that was playing an important role in the thinking of our Strategic Air Command, which was operating the bases. Morocco became important. The U.S. talked in the same terms about Libya and Wheelus Air Force Base, the Azores, about other bases around the world. But because of this strategic measure we were doing everything possible to m�nager (spare) the French, i.e. to be very careful about maintaining good relations with the French. They were an ally in NATO—not totally committed to NATO, but they were our ally, and we had this common adversary. And that superseded all other considerations in our relationship with the Moroccans; we treated the latter accordingly.

Q: Well, then, back to this contact with the young official of the Ministry of Mines.

NORLAND: Right. He would come around, and he would pass information about what the Istiqlal was doing, how they were organizing, mobilizing. They even began a newspaper at this time. We were trying to find out whether there was Communist influence in Istiqlal. And there were, of course, some members who were Communists, but we were convinced that they were not dominant in the movement. So we maintained this contact.

I have to say that, later on, I discovered that our CIA representatives, who were based in Tangier, were receiving Istiqlal and other nationalist leaders, without the same inhibitions because it was the so-called international city. The Moroccans who got to Tangier felt much more open about seeing our people, although I'm sure the French knew who they were and who was being received.

Q: Did you ever worry about the French sending agents provocateur to you?

NORLAND: Oh, yes. And the French occasionally would seek Bill Porter and ask: “Why are you receiving these Moroccans?”

And he would reply, “We don't turn people away if they come to our door. We can't turn them away, but we do not receive them in their capacity as independence movement leaders. We are an open country, an open mission, and we receive anybody. Send over your people.”

He was very good at this.

Q: When talking to this young Moroccan man, were you trying to extract information without giving encouragement?

0017

NORLAND: That's right, that certainly describes it. It was to show that we were open, and not renouncing our past. We recognized that our country had produced the Declaration of Independence (which they kept reminding us), and that it was contrary to our historical tradition to oppose independence. But I can remember saying, time and again, “Look, we're in an international confrontation here, and once this is over, who can say.” Meanwhile, our instructions were to do everything possible to cultivate the French.

And, incidentally, in running the American Library in Rabat, which I did for a year, we were discouraged from having Moroccans come into the center. We oriented our programs almost exclusively to the French.

Q: Why was this?

NORLAND: Because if we brought in Moroccans we could be accused of tainting them with the ideals of independence. I know the French used to plant people inside the door and take note of which Moroccans would visit the Library. We were running a book-lending operation, for example, movies, art exhibits; the invitations went almost exclusively to the French and to those very few Moroccans who were considered to be approved, like the one that I was seeing, Mohammed Douiri.

Can you imagine having an information operation in a country of about twelve million, with only perhaps a couple of hundred thousand French, and yet the whole operation geared to the French?

Q: Was this causing discomfort with you and with others?

NORLAND: Sure, but orders are orders.

I can remember one exhibit, for example. I had some people who were quite good at putting things together. We were trying to convey to the Moroccans, as well as to the French, what our policy was, and so we called one exhibit La Pieuvre Rouge (pieuvre is octopus, in French).

Q: The Red Octopus.

0018

NORLAND: We had all kinds of tentacles going out, including USSR tentacles, toward Morocco (we were trying to justify our important base operation). This was an attempt to educate both the Moroccans and the French. To the Moroccans, we were saying, “Look, there is a greater danger even than your French colonial master.” And to the French, we were saying, “Look, you can trust us. We understand the global threat, and we're going to continue the policy as long as this danger persists.”

It was something, all the military resources in the country.

Q: Then you moved from the USIS.

NORLAND: To the consulate general, where I became the political officer. Jack Bowie left, because he didn't get along with Bill Porter. And I was asked to move. We liked Bill and Eleanore very much. It was great to work for him.

Q: As a political reporter, you say you were counting up terrorist incidents and all, but were there any official Moroccans you could talk to openly, or weren't you able to go to the palace?

NORLAND: No. The palace was guarded very carefully. Bill Porter, the consul general, would go there on ceremonial occasions, but little business was transacted. I don't think, except for special occasions, he was allowed to see the king. It was very much a resident-general-oriented operation.

Incidentally, the resident general always had a Moroccan aide-de-camp, a military aide. That was very good for photo ops., as we would say today, because it looked as though some Moroccans were supporting the French presence. There were Moroccan soldiers totally integrated into the French military—very good soldiers, always well trained and groomed; they also had cavalry (horse) divisions. There was one particular aide-de-camp, assistant to the resident general, who seemed always to be around. The French would present him proudly. Colonel Oufkir would meet Bill when he got out of his car, walk him up the red carpet, sit in the Resident General's meetings, and escort him back to his car. To make a long story short, it turned out that Oufkir told Bill Porter of his sympathies for the independence movement. So, during the years where the French thought they were showing off Moroccans loyal to the French, in fact, their “model” turned out to be a strong independence supporter. I've never seen this in print but I'm confident it's true.

Oufkir became suspect in later years...as detailed in a book that came out last year, called “Notre Ami le Roi” (Our Friend the King), by a French investigative reporter who documents the fact that Colonel Oufkir was among those trying to overthrow the king at Fedala, site of the king's house south of Rabat, during a major celebration.

0019

Q: Ah, yes, the birthday party. This was King Hassan, the son.[By then, Oufkir was a general and Minister of the Interior]

NORLAND: That's right, Colonel Oufkir was one of the key people in that whole episode, and was himself killed. One of the things that this book, “Notre Ami le Roi,” goes into in great detail is that Colonel Oufkir's wife and several children, including a five-month-old child, were held in jail without bail, without hearing, without any judicial process, until about a year ago (1991).

Q: Oh, my God.

NORLAND: It's an example of the arbitrariness of the king. And I don't think you can read this book, or two or three others that have come out as well, without concluding that King Hassan, the son of Mohammed V, is guilty of gross violations of human rights. The comparison made a year ago was with Saddam Hussein.

Q: Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

NORLAND: Of Iraq.

Q: Well, King Hassan was just a boy at the time.

NORLAND: True.

Q: So he didn't play any role at all when you were there.

NORLAND: He was a playboy, the prince.

Q: Among the French that you'd meet, was there disquiet about the future of French dominance there?

0020

NORLAND: It's part of the posturing that goes on in these countries always. If you show the slightest crack in your psychological armor, even admitting the possibility that there might be change in the future...the French might agree but would respond, “Eventually, perhaps, sometime down the road.” But the thought of a break soon—such as occurred in Morocco in 1955—came as a shock. It came when Pierre Mend�s-France became prime minister of France and decided that resistance to change was not useful.

There was the difficult problem of the colons, the farmer-colonizers. There were organizations of colons who would simply not countenance the thought that Morocco would not forever be the way it was, that they would be forced to leave their beautiful homes and their easy situations, with servants and cheap labor responding to their beck and call, as they had always done. We knew people among the French (unfortunately, those were the people that we socialized with) who had the swimming pools, the parties; and Moroccans were wonderful as domestic servants, very good at many different tasks.

So there was no apparent concession of any significance among the French that I knew. I knew a number of people. I was an official of the Franco-American Club, for example, where I helped bring together French and Americans—the Americans to learn French. We produced tourist outings, lectures. We'd give French officials a chance to explain their policies. Moroccans never attended those meetings.

Q: Were you there during the changeover?

NORLAND: Yes.

Q: Could you describe how it developed. You might also talk about our response and the feeling of our reporting, how we saw this. Or was this something that basically happened in France. And then how did it work out?

NORLAND: As far as our operation in Rabat was concerned, we were on the defensive, in the sense that we could not produce these earthshaking changes. We were simply reporting. We had little influence on events. It was the Moroccans who were creating the conditions that became insupportable. They accelerated terrorist activities. They began demonstrations, which we would report. They were usually under some euphemistic heading, not independence, but for higher wages, for example, or against something the French had done. They would make their wishes known in various ways. But it was the French in France, the Pierre M�ndes-France types, who had concluded that this was simply untenable or affordable and France would have to do something. And they then had to decide with whom they were going to negotiate.

0021

Do you remember the sequence of events, by the way?

Q: Not in detail.

NORLAND: In August of 1953, the French found the presence of King Mohammed V in Morocco uncontrollable. So one very dark night (I think it was the 18th of August 1953), they removed him from the palace and took him by plane to Madagascar, Antsirabe, if you know Madagascar. [There are three Antsirabes in Madagascar.] There he was kept until 1955, about the 25th of November. In the interim, the French brought in a minor religious leader named Ben Arafa, from F�s, a man who could scarcely speak. (I guess his Arabic was good, but he didn't speak French.) They made a puppet king of him. As you know, the king of Morocco is also a spiritual leader. The principal sects regard the king of Morocco as the descendant of Mohammed and, as a result, pay religious as well as political allegiance to the king. Ben Arafa was able to claim some of that authority. But he was still a puppet, and everybody knew it. So there were a succession of anti-Arafa demonstrations. They were publicly pro Mohammed V, of course, but everybody knew that in fact they were calling for the sultan's return. The sultan's return then became the loudest rallying outcry, when Moroccans talked politics.

But, it was what was going on in France that created the change.

I'm sure that the French in Morocco were reporting that the situation had become increasingly difficult because there were some extraordinary events.

For example, the large demonstrations. On occasions when the French were trying to put on a good show, the Moroccans would refuse to show; they would boycott an event. And it became apparent that the event couldn't take place.

And various things occurred that could have had significant implications. I don't know if they did or not. But I go back to the commanding general, General Duval, a four-star French general, a man who had a gimpy leg. At the time, I was playing quite a lot of tennis, and he saw me at one point and asked me to become his regular tennis partner. This was morning tennis, after which we would have orange juice, coffee, and croissants at a little cabana right next to the court. The general and I got to be quite well acquainted.

But one day he asked me if I would like to go with him on a flight into the interior, to show me, as a political officer at the consulate, how his troops were combating a dissident movement in the interior.

I asked Bill Porter, “What do you think?”

And he said, “Well, you know, it's up to you.”

0022

I had just become a father for the first time, and I thought, no, I guess I better not.

Duval went out that day, his plane crashed, and he was killed. Nobody knows whether his plane was shot down or whether he actually lost control. Whatever.

But the fact that they lost a four-star general was an event. It had a certain psychological impact on what was going on.

So there were incidents like that, combined with the sullenness of Moroccans in public demonstrations, that were obviously pointing the way.

You may have heard of the leader in Marrakech called El-Glaoui. Glaoui was from another age, really. He was “old fashioned” but it's worse than that.

Q: Hadn't he been around since the turn of the century, or something?

NORLAND: Oh, yes.

Q: I mean, he was the longest...

NORLAND: Pasha.

Q: Pasha. We're talking about well before World War I.

NORLAND: He was, at one point, kind of a nationalist. But the French got him and tried to bargain, using El-Glaoui's authority to try to get acceptance for what was going on in Rabat. And that just didn't work at all; it was a futile exercise.

But what's so hard for people to understand (it relates to one of your first questions) is the determination of the French people, the fact that they did have an effective army and military control. Yet if it had been just a matter of military resources, a military confrontation, the French could have hung on. But there was something else, as we later learned in Vietnam, that made it untenable and so disrupted the relationship that they could never have been comfortable staying in the country if they continued to resist in the way that they did.

0023

So they made concessions. And in November of 1955, I remember standing on the road leading from the airport at Sal� where the Bou Regreg River runs in the valley, with the king coming by on his return and hundreds of thousands of people lining both sides of the road as he drove back up to the palace. After that it was just a matter of formalities before he was totally reinstated and independence declared in March of 1956.

It was an interesting story.

Q: You were there during the declaration of independence?

NORLAND: No. In January of '56, I got orders to return to this country and assigned to the Moroccan-Tunisian Desk as the first desk officer for those two countries.

Q: Tunisia had also become independent.

NORLAND: The same month, right. I actually greeted the first representatives of Morocco and Tunisia, at the 21st Street entrance of “New State”. In the case of Tunisia, it was Habib Bourguiba, Jr. In the case of Morocco, it was Dr. Ahmed Ben Aboud, who's still a friend.

Q: Where did the Moroccan-Tunisian Desk fit in Near Eastern Affairs?

NORLAND: That's exactly what it was. There was no African Bureau at the time. It was under the Office of North African Affairs, which, incidentally, was, at the time, directed by Leo Cyr, with Fred Hadsel as the number two. But Bill Porter came back to take over that desk in 1957. After being the first charge in Rabat, he returned to the Department. So I worked for him another two years, five years in all.

Q: This was your first time working in Washington. What did you feel was the role of the Moroccan-Tunisian Desk? Here are two independent states, and sandwiched between them was Algeria. This was the period of the great Algerian war in the Department of State—the French Desk and the NATO people. France was absolutely key. And yet here you were, and Algeria was part of France. Anyway, could you describe how you saw this played out at the bureaucratic level?

0024

NORLAND: As usual, there are several levels in the bureaucracy. Just to give you a quick illustration: the governments of Morocco and Tunisia looked upon our recognition as a tremendous event and expected a great deal of us. They wanted technical assistance; they wanted a flood of student exchanges; they wanted to enhance their status. They competed actively to get us to attend embassy functions. So, on the one hand, we were being courted; on the other hand, they were trying to promote the Algerian cause. And they were telling us, for example, you should receive Ferhat Abbas (an Algerian nationalist). You should receive some of the other leaders (whose faces I can see and who I met at the time).

But, of course, we were reminded daily by the French Desk that Algeria was part of France (even though the rebellion had broken out in 1954), and we were not to mess around. Every time the Tunisians and the Moroccans wanted us to receive one of these Algerian leaders (there were some very distinguished people). I mentioned Ferhat Abbas, a pharmacist, and very moderate; there was another man, who was their regular emissary here, whose name I will come to). We could hardly get the French Desk to agree to let us see them. And the relationship with the French Desk often became tense. Some people on the French Desk were totally Francophile and saw these Third World liberation movements as nothing but an invitation to chaos. And you still have something of that division in the Foreign Service, if people honestly level with you. So the tensions were real.

Still, this didn't prevent us from doing everything we could for the Moroccans and Tunisians. And although there was much to be done, we didn't have the resources. We were not responding to the extent that both those countries hoped.

We did, however, succeed in doing one of the first things they wanted, which was to have official visits by their respective chiefs of state.

Q: As far as assistance, which was not as highly developed as it became later on, particularly in the Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon administrations, did we consider that in these two places, France could do its aid and assistance there, and we would concentrate elsewhere?

NORLAND: Well, we had no basis or experience for undertaking programs of real scope in those countries. The French controlled the economies of both.

And there was a time in both countries when the French gave every indication of being able to reconcile their economic interests and the new independent governments. There were a number of intransigent colons (French colonists) who returned to France, but a surprising number stayed.

0025

In the case of Morocco, King Mohammed V was very benevolent, very understanding. He was not a firebrand. He was quiet, possibly because he was not well and physically fragile. I remember shaking his hand a few times; it was a limp handshake. And yet he had tremendous stature.

So the French were not making a mad rush for the exits.

And what did we know that would qualify us to move in? What did we know about Morocco or Tunisia? Morocco was one of the first countries to recognize our independence. Actually they did so two weeks after France. We had a long history—but virtually no American presence in Morocco. We had a legation at Tangier, and a few investors. We had some American expatriates, like Paul Bowles and Truman Capote. But we had almost nothing in the way of real presence. I don't think we had a significant number of missionaries. The French had virtually dominated the country. So independence was largely ceremonial. And that's why the State visits were key.

Q: How did the visits go? I assume you got involved very much in them.

NORLAND: It was in October of 1957 that the king of Morocco came. By that time, we'd divided the office, so that there was a Tunisian Desk officer (Arthur Allen, who I think died). I was doing Morocco. The king came in October of '57. In those days, the U.S. president went to the airport, National Airport, to greet high-ranking visitors. As Desk officer I had been preparing a number of briefing papers. One very lengthy paper (drafted by the Historical Division) focused on the question of whether Morocco was the first country to recognize American independence. I was all prepared for a variety of questions as there was a certain amount of press interest.

President Eisenhower did go to the airport as scheduled. And waiting there beside the President, was John Foster Dulles; the chairman of the joint chiefs; several others from State, plus Bill Porter. And way down at the end, was I. Wiley Buchanan was in charge of protocol. About ten minutes before the King's arrival, Wiley Buchanan came walking down this line of people, accompanied by Bill Porter, to where I was standing, and asked me to “come up here”. The President was asking whether Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States or not. I walked up, with Bill Porter, and I stood there with the President and Dulles. And the President turned to me and said, in a very businesslike way, “Was Morocco the first country to recognize us?”

The answer was: “No sir, on August 15th of 1778, the French recognized us. Two weeks later, the Moroccans saluted one of our ships.”

0026

He asked me another question or two about what the relationship was of this particular king and the United States, and what we had been doing for Morocco, and so forth. Ike turned to Dulles and said, “Well, we can't say that they were the first, then.”

Dulles agreed, “No, we can't.”

I stood in that company for a few minutes before returning to the end of the line.

That was about 12:30. The ceremony was over. Then Eisenhower went back to his quarters and had a heart attack.

Q: Oh, my God.

NORLAND: To fill in at the first official dinner was Vice President Richard Nixon and I was asked to help interpret. At the official dinner, which was at the Mayflower Hotel, I remember the king, who did not bring any female with him, and Vice President Nixon, and Prince Moulay Abdullah. Prince Hassan stayed in Morocco. My task was to sit behind Mrs. Nixon and Prince Abdullah as interpreter—French to English. So I had an upfront perspective on events, and saw Mrs. Nixon in action with this prince. He was a ne'er-do-well, who had brought over several French ladies to accompany him, and didn't pay attention, wasn't interested in what Mrs. Nixon was saying, and, as a matter of fact, made some offhand cracks to me, which it would have been improper to translate.

There was a subsequent luncheon given at Anderson House, on Massachusetts Avenue. J. Edgar Hoover attended; it was hosted by Vice President Nixon. Those two talked very animatedly. I remember overhearing a little of their conversation.

Q: J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI and a very strong conservative, a very difficult man.

NORLAND: Yes. So the visit was disrupted—the flow, the level. They didn't have the big dinner at the White House. And, of course, people were very concerned about the President's health which was the subject, as I recall, of the Hoover-Nixon conversation.

It was an interesting visit. The Moroccans never showed their dissatisfaction with events. They're too polite. I still have two autographed pictures from King Mohammed V of Morocco—they forgot they'd given me one, and they gave me another as a souvenir of the visit.

But then the king died in 1960; he had not been well, and King Hassan took over.

0027Q: Did Bourguiba come to the United States?

NORLAND: Yes, Bourguiba also came to the United States. He was dynamic. I did not get as deeply involved in that visit. I didn't attend the major dinner, although I did attend the reception and had a chance to talk to him. And his son became a friend. Bourguiba's son had a boy who was the same age as my eldest son, and we actually shared babysitters at one point.

Q: He was ambassador to the United States.

NORLAND: He became ambassador. He was first minister; Mongi Slim was the ambassador. But he was the first person to come to the U.S. and prepare the way. And he was an awfully nice person, as you know—and competent. Married to the daughter of the interior minister of Tunisia, and very well placed. He'd come with his family to share a snack at the house and bring his son over there, and they played together. We later saw Habib, Jr. when he became ambassador to Italy. He went through a period where he was not well. But Habib, Sr. didn't speak English, and so a lot of his charm was lost in translation.

But there were distractions even in those days that kept President Bourguiba's visit from becoming the major event that the Tunisians would have wanted.

Q: How much, particularly since you were dealing mainly with Morocco on the Desk, did the air base and the navy base that we had there continue to dominate our policy during that period?

NORLAND: They were very important. As long as Mohammed V was alive, it seems to me, the pressures on us to leave weren't great. I left the Desk in the fall of '58, having done almost three years, but I have to say that as of the time that I was still on the Desk, Mohammed V was still around, and there were indications, but I don't think anything more than that, that we would be asked to leave. And we were doing everything possible to conduct a rearguard action that would enable us to stay.

I think by the end of the Fifties, the king had also come under tremendous pressure from Istiqlal that led him to conclude that we would have to leave our bases. And I'm sure that it was in that period that the king said, “Prepare to leave.”

Then we had negotiations that resulted, for example, in one of the bases, Nouasser, outside Casablanca, being turned into an international airport. The one near Marrakech, Ben Guerir, was closed. The same for the base near Mekn�s. Two of the bases were never operational. They became a source of acrimony, needless to say. Our military were not very pleased.

0028Q: Well, this, of course, is always one of the problems. Once we're in, the State Department finds itself in the not-very-pleasant position of trying to protect our military interests in the place, while at the same time trying to curb our military which wants to really sort of take over. Around the area, our people don't come under Moroccan law, and there's always the unhappiness and all that.

NORLAND: Status of Forces agreement was one of the major problems that we had with the Moroccans. When our people committed criminal acts, e.g., violence to Moroccans such as automobile accidents, it did not go over well that we were able to extract those people from Moroccan jurisdictions. That probably contributed significantly to the Moroccan decision to ask us to leave. I leave it to others to assess to what extent that was done entirely amicably, or whether there were some residual problems that have impaired our relations ever since.

Q: How about the October '56 war, which we know as the Suez crisis? How did that impact? I guess at that time you were dealing with both in Tunisia and in Morocco.

NORLAND: I know that we were deeply concerned that there would be events in both countries that would be inimical to our interests. As I recall, there was no overt anti-American activity. I'd be surprised if the record shows that there were even significant incidents. There may have been minor ones, but I don't think anything serious came to our attention. This is one of the things I learned early on, and that is that Tunisians and Moroccans did not automatically follow the Arab policies. They were never pro-Israel, but they were not just automatically pulled in to whatever Arab position was being adopted. And as for the Suez, I'm sure that there were public manifestations, probably attempts to collect funds and distribute various forms of assistance to Egypt and victims of the war, but the governments were restrained.

Q: How about Nasser? What was our reading? This was during the period when we were really concerned about Nasser becoming the major influence over the whole Arab world. How were we reading him as far as Tunisia and Morocco were concerned?

NORLAND: In Morocco, the Voice of the Revolution, his Arabic radio station, was widely listened to. As long as Morocco was not independent, it was a very important rallying point; as soon as they got independence, it tapered off. And Nasser did not respect Islam the way that good Moroccans would like and would expect Islam to be treated. The king, as I say, has a religious role, and there was no great sympathy in Morocco for Nasser, not at the governing levels. At the popular levels, I'm sure people would say Nasser was popular, but when the final choices had to be made, there was not great sympathy for him.

Tunisia was much closer and there was not this same religious barrier.

0029Q: Bourguiba was very much a secular figure.

NORLAND: Yes. But he had already taken his distance from strict Islam in a number of ways. For example, allowing women to go without the veil, encouraging women to be educated, giving women positions in government—something that still is hardly done to this day in Morocco. If I'm not mistaken, Bourguiba was strong enough to be confrontational at times with Nasser. But, again, that was peripheral, and it didn't become an important factor in our relations.

Q: Speaking about relations, in NEA. Here NEA had a major crisis with the Suez thing and all this. Did you all have the feeling that dealing in the North African side, not including Egypt of course, but did you feel that you were all kind of off on the back burners?

NORLAND: Yes. The Suez invasion we thought was an unfortunate event. And we were worried that Eisenhower was going to go along with the French and British.

Q: Oh, yes.

NORLAND: We were worried, and it was a great relief when Eisenhower pulled back.

I wonder if Dulles really agreed with that? Dulles was such a colonialist in his own mentality.

But Eisenhower pulled back, and that spared relations between our two countries (Morocco and the U.S.). It enabled us to go forward on virtually the same track that we had been on when those events occurred.

But you're right, we were peripheral. The Department kept sending requests for people to go in and talk to the governments concerned. But I don't recall that we had any real problems with either one.

Suez Canal Users Association, do you remember that?

Q: Oh, yes.

NORLAND: Opinions were by no means undivided...in those days. But, as I say, Eisenhower's action in taking his distance from the French and British actions saved our relationship.

I think Dulles would have done otherwise.

0030

Q: Well, he certainly didn't care for Nasser.

NORLAND: Oh, no, nor did we.

Q: There was a palpable distaste, for both of them.

Going back, covering both times, both as a Desk officer and, before that, serving in Rabat, how were we reading the Moroccan Jews? Israel had been formed; very confrontational in the Arab world. We had the example of what Hitler had done to the Jews during World War II, the holocaust. And we had a strong Jewish lobby. So we must have been looking at the Jewish situation very closely this whole time.

NORLAND: Do you know that Moroccan Jews, with few exceptions, were considered to be protected by the king directly. They had what I'm sure would be described in Moroccan law as a special status.

Q: Prot�g�s.

NORLAND: Prot�g�s, in a sense. But that has quite a different connotation. There's another word for it, which I can't think of. It might come to you. But, in any case, there was not the alarm in the Jewish community in Morocco that you would find in some parts of the Arab world.

Moroccans quietly made their way to Israel. There is no question about that. The numbers were relatively restrained, I would say. And even to this day there are important settlements of Moroccan Jews and Tunisian Jews who have stayed and who have integrated and who seem to be satisfied. I don't think they have been the object of government efforts to persecute them or to cause them harm. But things go on very quietly in that field; there is not a great public announcement when Jews leave Morocco or arrive in Israel.

And yet the king has done some very interesting things. He met with Peres, remember, in Fez.

Q: Shimon Peres, who was...

NORLAND: Who was then prime minister of Israel. Oh, that was a daring move. That was only '86 or '85?

0031

Of course, the king has also done some unusual things. Do you remember the Libyan-Moroccan agreement of 1984?

Q: Oh, yes, one of these joint-nationality things that the Arab world seems prone to. One just has to wait about two to three months, and they're dead again.

NORLAND: And, of course, there were such incompatibilities. By this time, I had taken a particular interest in Qadhafi. Among other things, he's strongly anti-monarchist.

Q: Then you got a very interesting assignment. You went to Abidjan, where you served from '58 to '61.

NORLAND: Actually, I left in December of '60.

Q: How did this assignment come about?

NORLAND: [laughter] I tell you, it was an example of the Department personnel system. I was working on the Moroccan Desk and was walking down the hall one day, when I met Charlie Lemmo, an admin officer in AFEX (Executive Bureau). Charlie said that our consul in Abidjan was being PNGed, and they were looking around for someone to send out. Would I be interested? And I said of course I'd be interested. I was tired of Washington; I'd been here almost three years.

And so, on quite short notice, I was made consul in Ivory Coast, Abidjan. In historical perspective it may be useful to note that I was only the second consul. My predecessor had only been there for a year and a half (he came in April '57 I believe), and until then we'd had no representation. We were still living under the most elementary conditions—a two-bedroom house for my family. I had two sons then, and a daughter was born there in March of 1959. According to local historians, she was the second white child born in Abidjan. The French would send their wives to France or upcountry to missionary hospitals; they wouldn't think of having children born in Abidjan. We were having good luck with a local French doctor, and didn't see any reason not to stay, although there were no anesthetics or what you'd call modern hospital equipment. It was pioneering in many respects.

Q: In the first place, how did the consul get PNGed (persona non grata)? And then what was the situation there when you arrived?

0032

NORLAND: He got PNGed because he had not shown sufficient respect for the French. He got picked up, apparently, and influenced...this is now hearsay, because I've never been able to get the full facts, but people in Ivory Coast told me that he allowed the Xerox copying machine in the consulate general to be used for anti-French leaflets. Another one told me, on good authority, that he carried a pistol. In several other ways he had reportedly insulted the French, so blatantly that the man who was in charge of that country then, and is still president today, Houphouet-Boigny, supported the French. Houphouet was friendly with the French, and did not do anything to stop my predecessor from being ousted. He couldn't probably have done much.

Q: Had you picked up anything while you were on the Desk, or before you went out, about the man's attitude? Did you think this was probably a problem?

NORLAND: Yes, there was definitely something there. The Department didn't fight it. That's usually the first sign that there's something going on. And my predecessor didn't fight it. And his wife reportedly did not like Abidjan. They were bridge players. And there was one person who was continuity and a source of some of those reports. The CIA officer was Bill Dunbar. You may have heard of him; he was later a historian of the CIA on Africa. Bill came to Dakar to meet us and to escort us back to Abidjan; he told us that my predecessor had done a lot of funny things. Bill was not one to make stories up.

Q: So we're really talking about a personality problem and not any real state to state...Well, when you went out there, you were basically our representative to the Ivory Coast. This was before independence.

NORLAND: This was two years before independence.

Q: Was anybody saying, “Okay, Don, this is what we want out of the Ivory Coast, and these are our interests there,” or anything like that?

NORLAND: There was so little knowledge about the country that I don't think we could have fashioned a letter of instruction. What we did have (and this is something which I'm prepared to document, because it really is a ridiculous episode) we had a consul general in Dakar, and the consul general thought that it could never happen that the rest of those countries in French West Africa would become independent.

Q: Who was the consul general?

0033

NORLAND: Don Dumont. And Don Dumont was so sure that the situation that existed then was going to prevail that he could not believe that there was even a need for another person to be assigned to Abidjan.

Q: Was he what you might call a French hand?

NORLAND: Yes, he was. And his wife was French.

Q: Oh, yes. This so often was the case for a long time. Dakar was sort of our French outpost down there, and we sent the equivalent to the American colonial officers out there.

NORLAND: That's right. And he actually was so convinced of this...And it was easy to do if you've been to Dakar. You know there are those big, beautiful buildings. The French had made of Dakar a real bureaucratic headquarters, a center from which they governed all the rest of West Africa. And they did it by having residents general in the other eight countries, but all reporting was sent through Dakar, where they had a person of the stature of a minister. Louis Joxe, for example, was one of the great governors general in Dakar. Don Dumont got in that circuit and was convinced that we should not only agree with the French to do things their way, but we should actively oppose independence in these countries. And when I got to Abidjan, it didn't take me long to realize that Houphouet-Boigny was not only a person of considerable stature in his own right, he had been, remember, the number-three man in a post-war French government.

Q: Oh, yes.

NORLAND: A minister of state (ministre d'etat) and minister of health; he was an African doctor. A person of considerable stature within the RDA (Rassemblement D�mocratique Africain), which was his political party in all of French West Africa. But his Ivory Coast section of it, which was called the PDCI (Parti D�mocratique de la Cote d'Ivoire), was his instrument, and, in addition to all of his independent political power, he was engaged in a serious personal conflict with Leopold Senghor, who was the man to become president of Senegal. He didn't like Senghor, and the feeling was reciprocated.

Q: Too intellectual.

NORLAND: Senghor was intellectual. He had a French wife. He was writing poetry for French audiences. He was an agr�g� in the French educational system. And he became a member of the Acad�mie de France, which is to say, a veritable Frenchman.

0034

When I got to Abidjan I could see there were going to be problems.

Q: In the first place, sort of a wiring diagram, to whom did you report?

NORLAND: That was a problem. I reported to Dakar, but I began to send copies of my messages directly to Paris; we were still a colony under France. The first of our visitors, in January '59, was Cecil Lyon, the U.S. minister to France. Very shortly thereafter we had Ambassador Amory Houghton. So we understood that we were reporting through France.

Q: So you were very definitely part of the French...

NORLAND: That's right. Here, I'm quoting from a letter that Dumont wrote me in 1959.

Q: By the way, if you would like, we can include that at the end. But, anyway, please quote.

NORLAND: “Let me suggest, in the future, you send a personal note direct whenever you find yourself in the kind of a fix that seems serious to you and calls for prompt action. One other comment I would like to make concerns your distribution of copies of communications to sundry individuals and organizations in the Department. I think you ought to think twice before sending copies of your communications to the four winds.

“That is to say, if the substance is a matter requiring action on the part of the consulate general, you should leave it to the discretion of this office to see that the Department or the embassy in Paris is informed.”

Dumont was upset at this. I couldn't prevent it if I had tried. I could not have prevented this surge of independent thinking and emerging independence.

At the time Houphouet was actually resisting independence. He said, “We're not ready for it yet. In order to run a railroad, you need engineers,” was one of his similes, “and we do not yet have those engineers.” So he was not an extremist; but he wanted recognition as the leader of the Ivory Coast, and he was starting to do things that were quite different from what they wanted done in Dakar.

Furthermore, he had resources. His country was in the tropical forest belt. They had hardwoods, coffee, cocoa, pineapple. They had a base that made their GDP dwarf that of Senegal, which only had peanuts, really, and a few other things.

0035

So it was a matter of psychology in our not being able to adapt to this new reality. And, furthermore, if Abidjan should get ideas about independence, then what about all those other countries? And then what would happen to Dakar? Don Dumont could not bring himself to consider that Dakar, like Vienna, was going to become this massive head with almost no body or shoulders. He could not conceive of that, and vented his feelings. And this letter...I had it out for other reasons, which I'll tell you about, but it took a tremendous adjustment on his part.

Maybe I ought to finish this one story. He got so mad at me that he refused to write an efficiency report on me.

Q: My God.

NORLAND: It's hard to imagine. But in those days, it was not so unusual. At least two inspectors were sent out. Bob Ware was one of them. They came to Abidjan, went to Dakar, went to other posts, to try to figure out what it was that Don Dumont was so upset about.

I'm happy to tell you that, in each case, the inspectors came down on my side and said, “All you're doing is reflecting what you are confronted with here. You're reporting reality. Houphouet is running things here. He's not subordinate to Dakar, and you shouldn't be, either.” Although I was careful always to send Dakar copies, that wasn't enough.

The upshot of this, and this becomes a key factor in my career, is that in the summer of 1960, Africa got involved in the 1960 presidential campaign. John Kennedy had made quite a hit by stressing our failure to support Algerian independence and he decided to pay attention to Africa in general. So he sent Averell Harriman around the circuit. That's another story. And the Department, in response, sent Loy Henderson around in a private plane, with eight different section heads from the Department, including the head of FBO, the head of MED, AF personnel, etc.

Q: Well, this is a very famous trip.

NORLAND: A famous trip, indeed.

Q: A trip to go around to look to opening up Africa.

NORLAND: Exactly, and to try to counter the Democratic Party calls for more attention to Africa.

0036

Anyway, when Loy Henderson arrived in Abidjan, we got along well. John Stutesman was his assistant. Vaughan Ferguson was with him, and I'd known Fergie earlier when he was in Tangier. Henderson told me and others he was very satisfied with his visit to Abidjan. And he took me to Ouagadougou, to look over the situation there and to make decisions about whether we should have an embassy there and elsewhere. On the plane I was sitting across from him and he said, “Well done, thank you very much. Tell me, what's your status?”

I said that I was an FSO-6.

Q: FSO Six.

NORLAND: And that I hadn't had an efficiency report in 18 months. You should have seen him react. “Why not? Whose responsibility was this? Why has this not been a matter of record? What is going on here?” I told him of its Dakar-Abidjan dispute. He sat down and dictated a two-paragraph telegram, which is somewhere in the Department. About three months later, I was promoted. So Don Dumont helped me get promoted.

We came to Upper Volta, as it was then known, and I can remember him saying at the time, as he did again after we visited Niamey, and again in Cotonou and Togo, “Should we have an Embassy here?” After every visit, he would ask his staff and me (since I was accredited to those other three countries) whether we should have an embassy resident? And we would have these discussions; it was nip and tuck. I really was not strongly in favor of having an embassy in each one of these countries. I felt we could do it by traveling and reporting out of these places. As a matter of fact, Brandon Grove, who came to Abidjan as vice consul in 1959, went to Upper Volta, and he did a great report. And it convinced me that we could cover this country if desired. Why did we want to get people involved. I can remember Henderson saying, after he heard all these arguments, “We'll have a resident ambassador in each country.” And that was the beginning of a process we're now reviewing.

Q: Well, it's a political decision, not an administrative one, really.

NORLAND: That's right.

Q: And, in a way, fair enough.

NORLAND: Anyway, you can begin to see the feeling about this little post, Abidjan, where we had little experience or interest. In Dakar, we'd had a representative for decades, important people had been assigned there.

0037Q: Well, also, it was extremely important during World War II. In the first place, where would it go? And then de Gaulle tried to capture it and didn't succeed and all that. Later, it became an extremely important transshipment point, all across Africa, for the war in North Africa.

NORLAND: Absolutely. So it became a real battle.

Q: We haven't talked about how you reported on these other countries, and then your relations with Houphouet-Boigny. We really haven't gotten into any of the politics of the thing.

NORLAND: To illustrate the situation, I might note that as soon as I got to Abidjan, the decision was made to include Upper Volta within our jurisdiction. Even Dakar recognized that they couldn't travel there as easily as we could. We even had a railroad from Abidjan to Ouagadougou; it's still there.

Then Houphouet, showing his independence and his ability to organize, and wanting to move gradually and intelligently to independence, created an organization called the Conseil de l'Entente, which translates into the Council of Understanding, consisting of Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Niger, and Dahomey (Benin). And they signed a protocol that provided essentially that Ivory Coast would help its poorer neighbors. I made three or four trips on business to each of these countries, and so I was accredited to all four.

In May of 1960, Houphouet told me one day, “I can't resist any longer. We're going for independence.” Consider this in the context of West Africa at the time. Senghor had decided he was going to go for independence; Mali was out of control under Modibo Keita. Houphouet couldn't resist any longer.

When I communicated this to the Department, they had nothing better to do than to say, “You will be accredited to all four.”

When an independence date was set, the French decided to send two ministers and an airplane down to Abidjan to pick up Houphouet and take him to the other three countries to celebrate independence. I asked for and was given authority to go on the same plane. The British also sent a representative. We were the only two non-French foreigners.

0038

On the last day of July 1960, we took the plane to Cotonou, which is the [de facto] capital of Benin, then known as Dahomey, and we went through independence ceremonies for Dahomey on August 1, 1960. A day later, we took the plane to Niamey; on the 3rd of August 1960. I presented letters recognizing the independence of Niger. We flew on to Upper Volta and presented letters recognizing the independence of Upper Volta on August 5. Back to Abidjan, on the 7th of August 1960, I presented the letters recognizing the independence of Ivory Coast. The text of those letters is in the Digest of International Law.

So I had the unusual experience of traveling around in a French plane, with French ministers, Houphouet, representatives of different organizations, to confirm this advance of countries to independence.

Q: I would have thought that the consul general in Dakar would have grabbed this.

NORLAND: He was so upset that I don't think he could have enjoyed it. Maybe that's one of the reasons they didn't send someone from the States. A year later, Robert Kennedy attended the first anniversary of Ivory Coast's independence.

Q: It's all very interesting. It was great for you, but it was sort of a begrudging or a non-event.

NORLAND: In that sense, it reflected the true dimensions of our interests. Because what did we have? We actually had some interest in Ivory Coast. American missionaries made it possible to travel around. Houphouet told me once, that it was the American missionaries of the CMA (Christian and Missionary Alliance) who enabled him to read in his own language, which was Baule. They were the first to put the Baule language in Western script. That made a big impression on him. Of course, as you know, he converted to Catholicism and is a major figure in the church. He built the largest basilica in the world.

Q: Today is January 13, 1993. This is a continuing interview with Ambassador Don Norland. Don, we left off more or less where you, as a relatively junior officer, had just made this very interesting trip recognizing these various governments. We might backtrack just a bit, but on this, you were mentioning how little regard anyone was paying to these at this time. This was what, in 1959?

NORLAND: In 1960 independence came to these four countries.

Q: And so this was still under the Eisenhower administration.

0039

NORLAND: That's correct.

Q: Because really the new wind came in with the Kennedy administration. What was your impression about that time, and anything you were getting from other people, but basically your judgment about the viability of countries such as...

NORLAND: Well, we're talking about all of West and Equatorial Africa. Those were the countries of interest to me at the time, and they were all ex-French colonies.

I might just take a second to recall that the subject of West Africa became an issue in the 1960 elections. It was triggered in part by a long history that Jack Kennedy had of making some public declaration on Third World issues. In 1957, for example, he made a speech on the Senate floor suggesting that the United States was on the wrong track in the Algerian-French war. It was diplomatic but clear.

Incidentally, Bill Porter was then director of the Office of North African Affairs. It turns out that Bill had been briefing Jack Kennedy. Both were from Massachusetts. I'm sorry that Bill died and was not able to give us an insight on those contacts.

To make a long story short, Kennedy saw that there was some advantage to publicly question these colonial arrangements. (Remember, this was 1957. You'd think we would have learned something twelve years after World War II.) And this had its effect in 1960 when he sent Averell Harriman around to West Africa to try to accelerate American interests in that part of the world. And Harriman came to Liberia, where I went from Abidjan to meet him. He spent three days, I believe, In Abidjan, and then went on to Brazzaville. And my memento of this is this book which he gave me at the time, which is a reminder to me of the date.

Q: It's called Peace with Russia, and it says, “For Don Norland, with admiration for the fine job you are doing. My warm regards to you and Mrs. Norland. Averell Harriman, Abidjan, August 1960.” That book was published when?

NORLAND: In 1959.

Q: Harriman was certainly a man who was focused pretty much on the European relationship—ambassador to Russia, ambassador to Great Britain, troubleshooter and all. Did you go around with him at all?

NORLAND: Yes, I served as his interpreter.

0040Q: Could you give me a feel for how he reacted, because this was way out of his field, wasn't it?

NORLAND: I think that's the reason he was chosen. He could not be accused of being a soft-headed liberal subject to emotional concerns who might take an other-than-serious and objective policy assessment.

He went around, and, in talking with Houphouet-Boigny surprisingly found a comparable statesman. Houphouet acted the statesman role. He had an active private correspondence with Charles de Gaulle, and occasionally would read me excerpts from Charles de Gaulle's letters. There was never any suggestion in Houphouet's behavior that he was a supplicant or considered himself at a lower level than de Gaulle. It wasn't “I'm writing to the great man;” it was “I have found someone with whom I can correspond on equal terms.” One of the most interesting correspondence that I hope we will be able to read one day will be the private correspondence of de Gaulle and Houphouet.

So when Harriman came, he found this man who had been a minister in the French government—Houphouet had been the number-three in the French government—i.e. a minister of state. He had also been associated with the Communists at one time in order to advance the objectives of his RDA Party to obtain things he wanted, e.g., the abolition of forced labor. People don't realize that there was forced labor in the colonies.

Q: Yes, the couve or whatever.

NORLAND: Corv�e. Houphouet succeeded in making himself a player in French politics.

So when Harriman came, they were talking a very high level of diplomatic discourse. It had to do with the Soviet Union, which, incidentally, Houphouet detested. Way back then, no one will ever find any chink in his anti-Soviet armor. He had made that alliance in French politics for very practical reasons; there was nothing ideological. He was a strong Catholic, as we later discovered when he built his basilica. So it was a very compatible meeting.

As a matter of fact (I didn't bring it because it's a big book), I have pictures of a great soir�e that Houphouet organized on 24-hour notice to honor Averell Harriman. It was a soir�e dansant, outdoors, beautifully done. In Africa you can tell when someone is trying to truly honor a visitor. They go all out, the dancers, the best of the food, waiters. This was the Houphouet's reception for Harriman.

0041

Harriman left with great appreciation for Houphouet's statesmanlike qualities. I'm confident he used that expression. I have a letter, as a matter of fact, from Martin Herz in my files that says that he heard Harriman speak in New York at the Council of Foreign Relations in the fall of 1960, and he referred to Houphouet's standing as a statesman and as someone who had an understanding of the world.

Q: Well no, I'd like to pursue this a bit. When you look at this, and, again, I speak as objectively as one can, because I'm not an African hand, I'm wondering whether somebody like Houphouet-Boigny and a few of these other leaders gave sort of an erroneous impression of what we would be dealing with—our AID programs and our relations and all this. You had these highly educated, very sophisticated, and very effective leaders, a few of them, and yet did they fully reflect what their country was, the potential? Or were they just sort of a veneer on the top, and down below you had real African nations, with all the cultural and everything else problems that we were going to come up against?

NORLAND: Well, Houphouet never dissimulated as far as the status of his country was concerned. And, as a matter of fact, one of the most important comments I could make on that question is to say that Houphouet was a reluctant figure in bringing Ivory Coast to independence as early as he did. He was forced into it by other events, most especially the referendum in Guinea in September of 1958, where, of all the African countries, Guinea decided to refuse de Gaulle's offer of a French Community of which they would be part. It would have been autonomy. But he [S�kou Tour�} said, “No, we want independence.” Houphouet always considered S�kou as a young brother (un jeune fr�re).

Houphouet was able to resist the appeal of independence because of his standing and because of his rationale, which I often heard privately. He didn't say it publicly too often. His rationale was: We are not ready. His example (I believe it's in books) that he used to refer to is: “If you are going to have a railroad, and you want an engineer, you've got to have a trained engineer. You can't run a railroad with untrained people, and you can't run a government with untrained people.”

He was notorious, considered so by even his Ivory Coast colleagues, his fellow government ministers, for the degree to which he was willing to allow the French civil servants to remain in positions of authority in his own government. That reflected his view that the country was not yet ready for independence.

0042

When it came, he asked many of those civil servants to stay on in their positions. And they remained. It's only gradually that he worked Ivorians in...even among his immediate staff. Two come to mind, for example. One was from Algeria, virtually French in his training and his capacities. The other from Martinique, also very much a French-trained civil servant. The names are Belkiri and Nairay. Those two are there even today. I recently talked with our ambassador to the Ivory Coast, and asked him to greet Gouverneur Nairay and Monsieur Belkiri.

That shows Houphouet's desire for efficiency in administration and in the economy. He encouraged the French colons (the French colonizers), the French farmers, to remain. He encouraged French businessmen. He made deals with them. There was an element (this will not be published, I'm sure) but there was an element of continuity there that reflected Houphouet's honest appreciation (to get back to your question) of the Ivory Coast's ability to be a fully independent state and play the game that had to be played in the modern world, particularly the world economy. So Houphouet was trying to ease this transition. He recognized the weaknesses in his society. And that's one of the reasons that he put a lot of emphasis on building universities, of sending people to France, bringing French universities to Africa. I think he's probably considered successful in doing that.

What was less successful, and this is where I think your question leads to a whole other domain: he left French in positions of responsibility for the economy, and they tended to exploit the country without much consideration for the long-term effect that it would have. For example, they cut ninety percent of the tropical hardwoods; only something like ten percent remains.

Q: That's considered one of the great ecological country disasters.

NORLAND: No question about it. Despite his anxiety to achieve this status as a responsible, respectable nation, Houphouet didn't want independence just for the prestige or for the position in the United Nations. He scoffed at that—he wanted to be a modern nation in every sense of the word, for which education was key. For that he needed economic development, so he encouraged all-out production of cocoa and coffee and pineapple, which were his three principal agricultural commodities, and he encouraged it to the point that there was overproduction. And if you look at the history of the 1980s, it's clear it produced well beyond the capacity of the world market to absorb these products.

Q: We'd better quickly go back to the period we're talking about and concentrate on that.

NORLAND: Right.

0043Q: At the time, I take it that you, as with everyone else, were very impressed by Houphouet-Boigny. Or did you have reservations?

NORLAND: First of all, there was the personal angle. I was very fortunate to get along with him well, to the point that he would allow me to come and see him early in the morning, when he was sure that the French high commissioner would not monitor our meetings; the French high commissioner discouraged my seeing Houphouet on a bilateral basis before independence. Even after independence, the French mentality was to keep what they thought was an Ivorian money machine. They thought it was a productive country with great possibilities.

Q: This was the jewel of their colonial crown.

NORLAND: This was one of the jewels. It was an economically viable country, and the French treated it as such. It had resources; agricultural and, not so much mineral, but fishing.

So Houphouet was willing to deal very honestly. I could give you examples.

But at the same time, I saw that he was so concerned about his relationship with France that he was losing contact with his own people. He had his political party, the PDCI, and I attended several conferences where he would take the podium for hours. He was the master, he was the teacher, the professor, treating his own people as students, disciples and expecting them to follow.

He was not harsh in dealing with those who didn't agree. But there was a lot of quiet unrest, of intellectual effervescence. A friend of mine, who I believe, committed suicide, then minister of education, Ernest Boka, lived near me, so I used to see him quite often. He was most ill-at-ease with this paternalistic (I think that's the word that I would emphasize) attitude of Houphouet-Boigny.

Q: And this was very definitely during this period when you were there.

NORLAND: Fifty-nine and sixty. Right.

So, to answer your question as to how I viewed Houphouet, I saw him as being so eager to move forward on his agenda for modernization that he was not able to bring his people along in a way that would ensure success and long-term stability.

I was wrong. He's lasted until today.

0044

But it was not a healthy situation. Perhaps symbolic of his was his treatment of who would be his successor. For a long time it was a man named Philippe Yace. Meanwhile, he had oscillated—it was Konan Bedie, minister Denise. He'd go back and forth on who he was going to consider his successor if he should pass from the scene. He never wanted to take the issue seriously. And he didn't consult on the subject. He was somewhat imperious, a government dictated from the top.

Q: How about the other countries to which you had representation? How did you view these at the time?

NORLAND: I can tell you that I was struck by the fact (I have it in my own correspondence, and in reports at the time) that they were not economically viable.

Q: These countries were which?

NORLAND: Upper Volta, it was then called; Niger; and what was known as Dahomey. Now it's Benin. There was not the infrastructure. Their local legislative bodies were not representative. There was little trained manpower. And not many French were interested or willing or ordered to go to these countries, compared to Ivory Coast where the numbers were large. I think there were seventy-five thousand French of a population of five million. Now it's up to eleven million by the way. But the other countries were not promising.

For example, in Upper Volta, the leading tribe, the leading ethnic group, are the Mossi. They had a traditional leader, the Moro Naba [great lord] (you can hear the Mossi in that word moro), who was someone that I was told I should definitely call on. I called him the Moro Naba, a person with little education, if any, who was living in a completely traditional tribal atmosphere. He could be used to bring along his followers and to get them to support the government, but the government was largely an outgrowth of French colonialism. The president was Maurice Yam�ogo, who happened to be in the position of responsibility in the RDA, which Houphouet controlled. But he had a high school education and was not a person able to bring the country along. He didn't last more than about two years.

In Niger, there was a very nice fellow, Hamani Diori, who had the education, and he had a couple of people around him who were very good. Niger is a huge country, adjacent to Chad. Again, divided ethnically. There were those near Nigeria, where the bulk of the population lived, against the nomads in the north. And now, after many years of passive resistance, the nomads, known as Tuareg, are in virtually open revolt against the capital, Niamey. It's an artificial state. It's huge; almost a third the size of the United States. It doesn't show up there, on your map, because Africa itself is large. And what is it that could link that country together and make it viable? Indeed, very little.

0045

The same with Benin, a country that has three distinct tribal and political groupings: the north, the middle, and the south. When independence came, a man from the north became president. And he was so insecure, because the people from the south were actually more numerous and he was worried about his fate. He didn't last long.

Q: In those days, I take it, we were just trying to basically touch base. Did you really think that we were going to be putting embassies in those places at the time?

NORLAND: There is a tie-in to the Harriman visit. When Eisenhower and Herter heard about this visit of Harriman's, they said, “Oh, my God, we can't let this go unanswered, so we're going to send a team of people to Africa and really take our own assessment.” Have you heard of this trip before?

Q: I've heard of this trip. I'd like your impression of how it hit, because it's a very famous trip.

NORLAND: The Loy Henderson trip.

Q: This was the Henderson trip, of going around, sort of a caravan.

NORLAND: It was a flying staff meeting. He brought along something like seven office heads, including head of FBO; head of MED; Vaughan Ferguson was head of West African Affairs; head of Personnel. And they came in, in a four-engined plane, to Abidjan. I had made several tours to the other three countries, so I knew roughly what it was all about. They were assessing (the answer to your question) what should be done. They didn't want to appear to be negligent in the face of the Harriman trip and Kennedy's subtle emphasis on the United States assuming its rightful position in encouraging countries to become independent. And that's a very important point; that was the background here.

So Henderson came out, and we had talks. I'm sure we met with Houphouet, although there was only a courtesy call. It was mostly in-house, and we were talking about what we could do to advance U.S. national interests, to improve the status of the embassy, etc.

On this plane en route to Upper Volta, as it was known in those days, I was sitting in a compartment with Henderson, John Stutesman, and, I think, Vaughan Ferguson, and Henderson turned to me and said, “Well, should we have independent embassies in these places?” My first reaction was: no. I thought we were doing a credible job, and I thought that it could be done with a resident charg� and a floating ambassador.

0046

And there were other reasons for this, by the way. Let me just mention one. Houphouet himself recognized the non-viability of these other three countries, so he created an institution called the Conseil de l'Entente which, as you can tell, says very little; it says a Council of Understanding. What it did that was of importance was to say that every country was going to pool a certain percentage of its GNP, and from that pool, allocations would be made of what amounted to foreign assistance.

Q: Which basically was that the Ivory Coast would be helping these other three countries.

NORLAND: Exactly. And that was to do two things: strengthen Houphouet's role; and protect him from the criticism that Houphouet was going off on his own and not paying any attention to his African brothers, who were less favored by nature. So it was building a backfire of protection.

But the Conseil de l'Entente was operating. The other chiefs of state had their separate villas in Abidjan, where they would often meet. I could meet with them there; I didn't have to run around. Which was not easy, by the way, taking those old DC-3s, and trying to get hotel rooms, where the telephones didn't work.

I didn't see that we had anything really to gain in this part of the world by having independent representation. I'm sure I'm on record as having said this. As I say, maybe my reasons were a little bit self-serving at the time, but I had reasons for saying that we could do it if we wanted to.

And so we went on, and Henderson reflected and consulted others. Vaughan Ferguson, I remember, said, “I think we have to have separate embassies.” They were making assessments based not just on local conditions in West Africa, but on conditions in West Africa, but on conditions in Washington.

Q: And the United Nations.

NORLAND: And the spirit of the continent.

Q: Were internal American black politics, the black voter, mentioned at all?

NORLAND: Yes.

Q: Mentioned on the plane?

0047

NORLAND: Yes. Not only the American vote, but the United Nations' appeal, and the atmosphere of the times, which was decolonization. It was liberation; it was something bigger than West Africa, of course.

Anyway, to finish the story, we also went to Togo. But after we got out of Ouagadougou, Henderson said, “Well, what do you think now?” I'd showed him where I thought we should have the embassies. I had been there earlier to identify land that was available for either purchase where we could build embassies or office space we could rent, where we could get to work and start operating. But I remember leaving Upper Volta, and he went around again and said, “What do you think?”

And I said, “Well, my view hasn't changed.”

At the end, he said simply: “We will open embassies here.” I'm sure he made that declaration. And from then on, it was set. I think he made the decision after Upper Volta. You couldn't, then, say, “Well, we won't have an embassy in Niger,” or Dahomey.

It was un-Henderson-like, in my opinion. I think he was, himself, reflecting the feelings in Washington and his rather close relationships in the Eisenhower administration. He was not an ordinary FSO. And I think he felt that he would be doing Eisenhower and the Republican Party a great service by showing this sensitivity.

That's the Henderson trip.

Q: Sure.

NORLAND: I think I started to read from the Dumont letter last time, telling me to keep my aspirations limited here.

Q: He was the consul general in Dakar.

NORLAND: He was the consul general in Dakar.

Out of, I guess it was Ouagadougou, Henderson turned to me and said, “Gee, you've done a lot of work here. You're obviously well regarded. You can get appointments, and the people treat you well. When were you last promoted?”

And I said, “Sir, I haven't had an efficiency report for over a year and a half.”

“Why, that's not possible,” he said.

0048

I said, “Well, it's just that we've had this little argument with consul general, Dakar, and this is his way of taking revenge.”

He sat down and dictated to John Stutesman a telegram to Washington, outlining the situation and saying that I'd done a good job and I hadn't had a report.

I was promoted in about three months. It's one of the few times I've heard of what amounted to a field promotion. So I was very grateful to Mr. Henderson. And it settled, once and for all, the argument that I'd had with consul general, Dakar, I can tell you that.

So it was an interesting trip.

And then, of course, he went on to do virtually the same thing in Equatorial Africa.

Q: At the time, both before and during this trip, were there concerns about great tribal unrest, the boundaries getting shoved around and all? How did you feel?

NORLAND: Not the boundaries. There were some difficulties with neighbors, but they were mostly psychological. The differences between Ivory Coast and Ghana were remarkable. First of all, Nkrumah had taken a quite different tack. He said, “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be granted unto you.” And Houphouet said, “That's not right.” He told me and he told others, “You have to have an economic base.” And then there was the famous bet. Have you heard of the wager?”

Q: No.

NORLAND: Houphouet and Nkrumah apparently communicated, and at one point they bet which country would be farthest along twenty-five years hence. This is in a book that I have seen recently, reference to this wager. Whether it's apocryphal or not, I can't say, but I believe it's true.

Nkrumah took the road of revolutionary rhetoric, and this misguided idea of focusing first on African unity. That's probably the notion that caused Nkrumah to stumble and fall.

0049

Houphouet was quite the opposite: build with the resources you have; earn your position as a truly independent and responsible and prosperous nation in the world before you aspire to do all these other things. He ridiculed Nkrumah.

That set up tensions between the two countries, but the border between the two was almost impenetrable. People could go back and forth by water but we couldn't drive directly across. The one time I drove into Ghana, we had to go as far north as Kumasi. Now, I'm told, there are bridges across the rivers. It was difficult. So tribal groupings could go back and forth without paying attention. And there are linguistic and ethnic ties among the various tribes on the coast.

Q: One of the debates that academics play with a lot in the United States is that these country boundaries were artificial ones imposed by the colonial rule, that somehow the white imperialist did a terrible disservice to these African countries, and, because of this, they don't really come up with other boundaries. Again, I'm trying to go back to the time. Was it an article of faith, sort of, with you and the men on the plane and others, that, boy, we better keep these boundaries, because if we mess around with the boundaries to make them more equitable tribalwise, all hell will break loose? Or did you just feel that the boundaries were there and they were accepted by the people?

NORLAND: There had already developed a cultural veneer, applied externally, I must say, that made some sense out of those boundaries. In the case of Ivory Coast, for example, on the one hand you had Ghana, where the leadership was English speaking. Nkrumah had been trained in this country and in Britain. Houphouet was essentially Francophone. And that had already made a significant difference. It had been sixty years that the French educational system had been the dominant force, if not the only educational system of any consequence, in Ivory Coast. And I think the same thing could be said of the English in Ghana. Instruction in the indigenous schools, wherever they might have been, except for Koranic schools in some places in the north, was in English. Liberia had become Anglophone at this time. So there were differences in language.

There was a lot of talk about linking the French-speaking countries of West Africa into a larger unit. That reflected the view of Dakar, not just the American, but especially the French. There was a feeling that these countries were not big enough to be viable economically; they had to be linked to larger units.

0050

But Houphouet's point continued to dominate; namely, we have to have something to link up. What good does it do to link up vacant or unproductive spaces? We don't have infrastructure; we don't have railroads. There was a railroad to Ouagadougou, but the airlines were not very useful and the roads were poor. So what good does it do to talk about either regional organizations or aspire to control the territory next door? The borders were virtually meaningless in West Africa. That was not the same in other parts of Africa, but in West Africa I don't think it was a problem.

Q: So it wasn't an issue.

NORLAND: Border disagreements emerged, e.g. between Mali and Burkina Faso. And Houphouet succeeded in preventing a war from occurring between these two, in about 1983-84. But that came later.

Q: How long were you in the Ivory Coast?

NORLAND: I was in the Ivory Coast until late 1960. I came in '58, and I left in '60.

Q: So you left before the American administration changed.

NORLAND: That's right. But the new charg� had already been appointed, Bob Reams. There was a perfect example of the way things were done in those days. I can remember Loy Henderson, back in Abidjan after we'd made this trip in (I believe he was back in Abidjan), and he said, “Well, now we've decided we're going to have ambassadors, who should be the ambassador?” I've got my friend Bob Reams, who's in Syria, I'm going to see if he wouldn't be available for down here.” So he sent a telegram off, and Bob Reams was there before I left in December of 1960. I'll tell you about Bob Reams later.

Q: He comes back in a different period?

NORLAND: No, but his son is a friend of mine in the Foreign Service, and a nice guy, and I wouldn't want to say anything about his father if it might get out. Just one word: his father was not much interested in black Africa.

Q: Well, this was true of a good number of appointments within the Foreign Service.

NORLAND: That's right.

0051

Q: It was sort of a reflection of later on in Vietnam. ...to Africa, and I've got a good number of stories in my oral history collection. Of the first group that came out there, many of them were specialists in European affairs or Middle Eastern.

NORLAND: German specialists.

Q: And all of a sudden, here they are stuck here, with no feel for the country. And it was not a good show.

NORLAND: It was not always a good show.

Q: Of anyplace, this probably would have been the place to, in a little later incarnation, in a later administration, they would have reached down into the ranks of the FSO Fours and Threes, made them ambassadors, as we did in the Gulf states and some other places. But we were still playing the old...

NORLAND: The old-boy game. That's right. It was kind of pitiful. Bob Reams arrived and, within hours, was sitting in the office reading Time magazine. He had no particular interest in the people of issue. It was an example of how the Service could be run at that time. Loy Henderson didn't have to call on anybody or ask anybody's permission to assign these individuals. He wanted to name Fergie (Vaughan Ferguson) as ambassador to Burkina Faso, on the spot. Fergie resisted by saying he had other obligations.

Q: Henderson ran the Foreign Service Personnel Department sort of as his private fiefdom, not in really a bad way, but it wasn't always well suited. I have tales of people coming out of the men's room and meeting Henderson, who'd say, “Where are you going?”

And they'd say, “I'm going to X.”

“Oh, you don't want to go to X; I'll send you to Y.” And off they'd go to Y.

It was of this kind of personal nature, but at that point it was really getting beyond the fact that you could control these things.

0052

NORLAND: Yes, because the numbers were becoming very significant. In 1960 alone, seventeen African countries became independent. And he had no particular interest or knowledge in the area, so it was natural that he would say, “Well, it doesn't matter.” Damn it, I hate to tell you this, but this was an attitude that prevailed even two decades later.

Q: Well, Africa, this is sort of an aside, but I can't tell you the number of ambassadors that I've interviewed who were ambassadors because they had done very well somewhere else—Latin America, Southeast Asia. But there was no room for them there to get the equivalent to a tombstone promotion.

NORLAND: So true.

Q: Well, how did you feel at the time? When you left, did you say, “This is for me; I want to be an Africanist?” What was the mood? Was this considered a place not to go, or something like that?

NORLAND: Things were not easy in Abidjan the first year and a half. We were living under very difficult conditions. My wife had a baby there. As noted earlier, I'm told it was the second white child born in Abidjan. The French would send their wives back to France, of course, and sometimes upcountry to missionary hospitals. But we lived in a house that had two air conditioners. It was across the street from a military encampment with open sewers. The atmosphere was really Third World, I can assure you. I remember telling Joe Satterthwaite that we really had to start to think about living somewhere else. And, of course, he was under the influence of Dumont, who said, “Don't bother to build anything in Abidjan. It's just going to remain a little consulate.” But Joe Satterthwaite personally intervened with FBO.

Q: What was his position at that time?

NORLAND: His position was assistant secretary for Africa. I think he was the first full-time incumbent, because for a long time, it was in NEA, and the “A” stood for Africa. Joe Satterthwaite came out and saw the conditions and problems in trying to represent the United States. And he said, “I'll do what I can.” And he authorized me to make a deal for what's called a lease-purchase arrangement. We paid a certain amount per month, a fairly exalted rent. I think it was only a couple of thousand dollars a month; in those days, that was a lot. And that sum would be applied to the purchase of a new residence. We started the building, and actually lived in the residence which much-expanded with a swimming pool and so forth, is now the residence of the American ambassador to the Ivory Coast.

0053

But living conditions the first few months were such that we were worried about medical problems. Fortunately, we had what we thought were two good French doctors, who gained the confidence of my wife, so she stayed there to have our baby.

Living in the new conditions was difficult because of the climate. It's a hot climate, with high humidity, but it didn't bother me personally too much. And I saw that Ivory Coast did have the potential, if it could utilize the resources, to become a modern nation-state. I thought that was interesting. I saw that the others really were not as promising.

I realized that I was something of a pioneer, being accredited to four countries at once, and to go around, for administrative reasons, to identify properties. I was there to greet the first AID mission in 1960 before I left. It was headed by an officer named Bill Masocco and included Pierre Sales. I can still remember them coming over and saying, “Here we are; we're going to help people.” There was all of this sense of expectation. There was this phrase at the time: rising expectations, remember?

Q: Oh, yes.

NORLAND: It was an interesting time. I was ready for additional African assignments if they had come along. But I was also ready for a change. I left Abidjan on orders to go to The Netherlands, which I thought would be an excellent antidote. It turned out that somebody else heard about the Netherlands assignment before I did, so I went to NATO Paris instead. That too was a good antidote to Ivory Coast. And yet (I'm reflecting now on the overall experience), when it came to assessing what one was called upon to do, in terms of responsibility, in terms of administrative challenges and the potential for pioneering in a new area, Africa had many more challenges.

Q: My first post was Frankfurt, Germany, and I was due for assignment in '58, and I remember getting very excited, with my wife: “Boy, things are going to open up in Africa.” They were talking about opening a post in Nigeria, in Kano, and I put this down. Of course, I ended up in Saudi Arabia. But at the time, it looked exciting, as an opportunity.

NORLAND: That's understandable. For me, the difference was the degree of responsibility. Everything's relative. But in Abidjan I never felt I was dealing with a tinhorn dictator at some remote outpost. I felt I was dealing with someone who not only had influence in Ivory Coast, but in all Africa and in the French political system. He spent too much time in France (that became one of his weaknesses), and was too solicitous of French views. But, compared to my duties when I got to Europe...I mean, NATO was relative drudgery.

0054Q: I was just going to ask. From '61 to '63, you were in...

NORLAND: From '61-'63, I was in the U.S. NATO delegation in Paris.

Q: What were you doing?

NORLAND: I was in the Political Division.

Q: By this time, you were what rank?

NORLAND: Well, let me see. I had gotten that promotion. I was a Five. Maybe I was a Four by then.

Q: Captain, major level.

NORLAND: Yes, that's right. In NATO, there was an Economic, a Military and a Political Division. And in NATO there was an institution called the Political Advisors' Committee, POLADS. Do you remember that?

Q: Yes.

NORLAND: Well, a lot of people have been assigned to it.

Q: No, but explain what it is.

NORLAND: It was the weekly meeting of representatives, the so-called political advisors of the permanent representatives of the then-fourteen NATO countries. Their mandate was to talk about non-NATO areas, to coordinate policies and share information. The so-called permreps, permanent representatives, the ambassadors, talked about the major NATO problems; force structures and armaments, as well as the major political issues and what we were doing to counter the Soviets. But POLADS existed to talk about non-NATO issues and areas. And one of those areas was Africa. But the level of discourse was generally uninformed and there was so little interest except for the French and British, the result was a desultory discussion. There was no particular agenda; we were just comparing notes.

0055

And the most frustrating thing at NATO was that there was little room for individual initiative. I might sit there and say, “My God, we ought to be talking to our allies about a Cuban initiative, or a Chinese visit.” I couldn't raise it unless we had instructions from Washington. Everything said in POLADS was of interest only if it was on instruction.

Now you could have some interesting discussions behind the scenes with people, but there was not that much interest in Africa or the Third World generally. Much more interesting, was Eastern Europe or the Middle East. The agenda depended on the person who represented the country in the POLADS. But it was generally boring, almost mechanical. I can remember the language of the weekly telegram: “Request instructions on the following agenda items for the POLADS meeting on Tuesday.” And you'd get back a telegram saying, “Here is what you answer; here is what you're authorized to say.” And you didn't go beyond that.

Q: A major issue during the time you were there was the Congo.

NORLAND: Well, no, the Congo was a little bit before. I was still in Ivory Coast in the fall of '60, when the Congo really broke. In '61, there was still some effect, it's true, but the most important issue in my time was the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I did hear Dean Rusk when he came over. I guess we were all allowed to sit in, but it wasn't usual that you could sit in and hear the high officials.

And, as you know, the other thing is that the staff was filled with people who were not Foreign Service; they were Washington bureaucrats, who had agreed, very reluctantly in most cases, to have one assignment overseas, in response to the requirements of Wristonization. They were there reluctantly, and they didn't have a sense of unit organization or cohesion. Many of them were not even communicative. (I'll give you names if you'd like; some of them are still living.) And they wanted to treat this like INR or like the PM Bureau.

Intellectually, it was really not very challenging. I had had considerable experience dealing directly with chiefs of state—with chiefs of small states to be sure. But when the French officials came to Abidjan, they were often of ministerial rank, and I'd dealt with them. In Paris, maybe I'd get a deputy office director as an interlocutor; so it wasn't very exciting.

0056

But we did have a good experience in France. We lived near Versailles. We couldn't afford anything in town; the prices were astronomical, by our standards. I mean, a $600 a month allowance didn't go far and ours would have been close to $300. As a sidelight illustrating the charm of the Foreign Service we looked for housing a little farther from Paris. One day, I stopped at a housing office in the NATO headquarters, and someone had just put in an invitation to people to live in a country house on the edge of Versailles, in a town called Chesnay...a house we would share. We looked into it and it turned out to be a small chateau that had been built by a brother of Louis XVI. It was an historical monument, but the family happened to be in financial straits. It had been the country house of a fairly well-known French painter named Jean-Louis Forain. And the family was willing to divide the chateau in two; we would live in one-half; they the other. This meant improvising a kitchen and a bathroom upstairs. But downstairs was a salon where they had any number of Forain paintings, some of them sitting on easels. So we lived in an artist's former studio. And there was a glorious park behind it. One kilometer down the road was the Porte Saint-Antoine, which leads into the gardens of Versailles, where I sometimes did my jogging. I had the most wonderful sense of getting closely acquainted with Versailles. A couple of other colleagues lived in Versailles, because they couldn't pay these Paris prices. Among them Al Reifman and Abe Katz, economic advisors at OECD; another officer assigned to NATO secretary general Luns, was Pete Van Campen. We would carpool which was always interesting. It was always hard to get to Paris if you didn't carpool, because there was no good public transportation. There was something called the PV, Paris-Versailles, a taxi; you paid a couple of hundred francs, in those days. To have easy access to Paris was very nice.

And so I enjoyed my tour but not because of anything that happened in NATO. NATO was pretty prosaic.

Q: Did you get any feel for how de Gaulle was viewed, sort of in the corridors of NATO at that time?

NORLAND: He was making himself highly unpopular. I may have mentioned this before, but it's a theme in my career: I had gone to school in France, and I was at home in the French language and culture. I did not agree with de Gaulle's extreme nationalism that led him to say in 1966, shortly after I left, “You will remove all American military installations and NATO headquarters from France,” including the headquarters in which I was working.

That sentiment was building while I was there. He refused cooperation in the military aspects of NATO, although the French permanent representative, the ambassador, was still there. He just didn't participate in certain aspects of the military deliberations. It was quite extraordinary.

0057

And then there was de Gaulle's military philosophy... Do you remember the two phrases that described that philosophy? One was: “D�fense � tous azimuts.” It meant defending all 360 degrees of the compass. In the modern world, you had a hard time keeping a straight face. The other was: maintain the force de frapp�, his own nuclear force. I could not really see that that was very sensible. There were a lot of differences in the French delegation on this. Socialists, for example, did not agree.

And then we did have a major spy scandal. I knew one of the people accused of having spied for the USSR during this period. He did it, in part, because of the force de frapp� and the potential for serious confrontations that could result. That's written up in a recent book.

Q: From what you were getting, how did we view the Soviet threat during this period?

NORLAND: Well, this was the time of the Berlin Wall. No one questioned the need to fully mobilize. I was also representative on the Committee for Information and Cultural Relations (CICR) of NATO. We were trying to combat the Soviets on a psychological plane. I don't think there was any question that they were using every possible means to weaken us. This was the high point of their efforts to penetrate by spying. Their military was really nervous. I had the feeling that they were probing, although not irresponsibly. It turns out they were probably conservative. But we were fairly alarmist. It was a way of life. We focused our intellectual and other resources on how to confront this great danger.

Now the French government, at the same time, was very shaky. There were rumors about French generals in Algeria conducting a coup in Paris.

Q: Yes, with paratroopers. Were you there at the time?

NORLAND: I was there.

Q: How was NATO responding? There were a couple of nights where they expected paratroopers over the thing.

NORLAND: That's right.

Q: From your vantage point, how did you see that?

0058

NORLAND: It was alarming, there's no question about it. We listened to the news, we read the papers. I can remember huge headlines saying the paras were coming. There was an assassination attempt against de Gaulle; he narrowly escaped death at a crossroads south of Paris. One understood what was meant by instability and insecurity.

This family we lived with, by the way, was almost our same age; they had the same number of children, and our children got to know one another. We ended up communicating on many different levels. I think one of the reasons they wanted an American family was because of a sense of insecurity. One host talked about being certain that his children got an American education so they would be able to live abroad during an expected upheaval in France. And he was a strong Gaullist. He had fought with the French resistance and made a remarkable record, I'm sure. But there was a fundamental insecurity. The French were talking about not being able to remain in France. We felt also that the NATO forces, which were right next door to us in Rocquencourt, within a kilometer of the headquarters...It was a formidable military machine, and I can't say that I ever worried personally. I felt that we could always move about without concern about roadblocks or whatever.

We drove to Switzerland for vacations at almost every opportunity, especially at Christmas. I happen to have a Swiss sister-in-law, and her parents had a pension in the province of Vaud, a little village called La Praz. It was a pension, with family cooking—and a great relief to be able to spend time there. You know the atmosphere of Switzerland. Calm. In spite of any alarms that might be sounded outside, you had a good feeling.

Q: One last question about your time with NATO. What was your impression of the American military there?

NORLAND: Well, I saw General Norstad from time to time.

Q: He was the SHAPE...

NORLAND: I believe he was head of SHAPE at the time. We interacted a little bit with the military, and were in a position to see what they were doing. I never really got deeply involved. I'd had my own military experience, so I was sensitive to what they were trying to do. We were providing the necessary leadership. I felt that the U.S. was doing a good job. One of my most frequent contacts with the military was the PX. It was called Bel Manoir; again, within walking distance of where we were living. And you could see the way they could mobilize warehouses full of goods. That was symbolic of the abundance that we brought to the effort. The U.S. didn't skimp in efforts to make it a going operation. So it was quite a shock to be told, in 1966, that we would have to pick up and leave.

0059

The point I meant to make earlier, which I think is worth reiterating, is that there has been created over the years, partly as a result of our exclusion by resident French officials and civilians in the colonies, by the way the French treated us in NATO (the attitudes toward non-French-speakers, for example), a significant anti-French feeling in the American bureaucracy. We've never really been able to fully understand and to sympathize with or appreciate French policies and motivations. And I feel this has been overdone. I understand, as I have said, that their military policy was often ridiculous. But I do feel that we have a great deal to learn from the French, especially in the Third World. Not in the way that they conduct their bilateral relations, but in their willingness to get to the root of an issue. They studied the culture. They became anthropologists. They became adept linguists. They really did get to know those areas. And in our areas of concern, we've not wanted to consult or to benefit from their knowledge. This is one of the things that I find regrettable: we don't get the most out of them and their experience. We rather look at them as rivals. And that's not the proper approach, it seems to me.

Q: Well, you left NATO in 1963.

NORLAND: Right.

Q: You had, what, a tour at the...

NORLAND: At Montgomery, Alabama, at the Air Command and Staff College, one level below the Air War College.

That was revenge on the part of Personnel. I had the misfortune...I should never have done it, but I was having financial difficulties in Paris, even though we were living on the outskirts. I couldn't get ahead. I couldn't get a bigger car. I had a little English car at the time. And I felt I ought to have a change; NATO was boring. They offered me an opportunity to go to the embassy, to be number three or so in the Political Section. And I felt I ought to be able to do better. So I kept trying to hold out for another responsible position. I didn't care where; I think I was pretty much open on that. And somebody in Personnel (I think I know who it is; I've never actually broached it, and he hasn't to me) said, “Well, we'll teach Don a lesson for having said no.” And so they sent me to the Air Command and Staff College in Montgomery, Alabama, which was a long move, for about nine months.

It was kind of a dismal experience. I was one of maybe ten civilians, the only State Department person, with 600 majors and lieutenant colonels, talking about things which were not uninteresting, e.g. the strategy of air power, beginning with Billy Mitchell, bombing of a cruiser. So we tolerated it, but it wasn't a terribly instructive time.

0060

I learned something, and I came close to having a very good experience. I was asked to come to Washington (I hitched a ride on an Air Command and Staff College pilot's flight) to be interviewed by several people in Washington in response to President Kennedy's desire to get a firm fix on the French in their colonies: What was their aim? What were their ambitions? What was it they were doing? What was their attitude toward us? It was sort of an overall survey of France in Africa. I came up here and I was interviewed by Bob Good. He was the head of INR. He said, “You're our man. You've had that experience.” I'd had a couple of years' experience, but that was more than many others. I got on the plane and went back to Montgomery. Two days later, Kennedy was assassinated so they called off the whole project. But it was interesting. It would have been exciting to have been able to assess the French role early on, and to answer the corresponding question: What should America's role be in this part of the world? JFK was willing to undertake that kind of study. Of course, President Johnson came in the aftermath of the assassination.

But other than that, I had a few interesting experiences. I went through the flight test medical and some technical training. You get in a machine and are spun around. I went up in a fighter, looped the loop and got sick. It was not a highly useful year.

Q: Then you came out and you got, at last, to The Netherlands, is that right?

NORLAND: Yes. The great irony, having missed it before — my predecessor in The Netherlands, who'd gone there in 1961 when I was supposed to go there, was transferred and I was able to replace him. But this is another assignment resulting from a chance meeting in the corridors of FSI. I was at FSI studying Spanish, assigned to Ecuador in a new position as “executive director” of the country team.

Q: Was this also part of this matrix-type...

NORLAND: I think so.

Q: I remember I was offered that job when I was in Yugoslavia. They said this is a big thing. God, I looked at this and I said, “Oh, my God.” My gut instinct was to stay away from that.

NORLAND: I know. It looked like another level of bureaucracy. But it was a chance to get into another area. I felt I'd done Africa. I couldn't get an African assignment. And it was a chance to learn Spanish. So I was in intensive Spanish. And I happened to meet Julius Walker. You know Julius?

0061Q: Yes.

NORLAND: I met him in the corridor one day. He was in Personnel, and he asked, “What are you doing?”

And I said, “I'm studying Spanish, preparing to go to Ecuador.”

“To do what?”

And I told him.

And he said, “You don't want to do that.”

I said, “That's interesting. Why not?”

He said, “Well, let me look into it, and I'll give you a call.”

Within a week, he called to say, “How about The Netherlands?”

And I said, “Absolutely.”

I didn't think I was giving up anything particularly important.

So I went to The Netherlands instead. But it was one of those corridor arrangements.

Q: You were there from '64 to '69. What were you doing there?

NORLAND: The first two years, I was the deputy political counselor, number two in the Political Section. There I had a boss who was a true Wristonee. He sat in his office, with the morning telegrams and the newspapers that he could read (he didn't read Dutch) and the periodicals and the INR studies, and he read. And I studied Dutch an hour every day; I don't think I missed a single day, five days a week. I studied with a wonderful teacher. The Department's arrangement was: You give us a half hour of your time, and we'll give you a half hour of the Department's time. So I was there at eight o'clock for an hour. I later got a rating of 4/4 in Dutch language.) Knowing Dutch was a way of getting out of the office. I made it a point to get out and meet people. The Dutch are very approachable, once you make the effort.

My first year there was torture. They had an inexperienced charg�, who had imperious attitudes. One notable incident: he came into a room where a colleague was still sitting, and said, “When the charg� comes in, you stand up.” Now I happened to be already standing. But that was an attitude that stuck in the craw of a lot of people. A Wristonee.

0062

The political counselor was also a Wristonee, who'd had a previous assignment as a labor attach� in India, but had no particular interest in NATO, or the EC, or the Dutch and their culture. He was a bookworm, in a sense.

Q: For the reader, you might explain what a Wristonee was.

NORLAND: Someone who had been in the Department of State in a Civil Service-type position, and who was told, as a result of the Wriston Report of 1953-4, that you had no option; if you wanted to stay in the Department, you must make yourself available for overseas duty. They were given a certain amount of time. But in the shakedown of what would happen, they ended up, most of them, taking a job rather than being dismissed.

I'd had one of those in NATO, a man who just went around wildly, thinking that this was his opportunity to make a tremendous impression with his rigid, disciplined attitudes. It was a difficult experience.

Anyway, a year of this in The Netherlands, while I spent my time getting acquainted, learning Dutch, and then both those men were transferred. Not coincidentally, by the way, because the new ambassador was Bill Tyler. And he brought with him Earl Sohm. And they brought with them Cleo Noel. You know Cleo Noel's name?

Q: I know Cleo. He was killed, of course, in Khartoum.

NORLAND: That's right. Cleo became the boss in one of the best hierarchies that you could possibly imagine.

Q: Bill Tyler was Mr. Europe for some time.

NORLAND: He had been the assistant secretary.

Q: Assistant Secretary for EUR.

NORLAND: Right. I'm told that his oral history is one of the best, and at some point I would like very much to read it. I've maintained contact with him, and I occasionally see him.

Q: He's a fine man. I interviewed him over a period of about three sessions, I think.

0063

NORLAND: He is remarkable.

Q: A very, very nice man.

NORLAND: He brought so much. Tremendous. I mean, he is the most erudite man I've met—not in a disagreeable way, in a modest way. Excessive modesty perhaps. He is a most Renaissance-like man. He had unbelievable qualifications: an ability to identify key issues, his dealings with Josef Luns, the foreign minister of The Netherlands, his way of managing the embassy. Earl Sohm, too, had such a delicate touch. And Cleo was so good; interested in everything, and willing to let me have the run of the job. He said, “Go and meet people, get acquainted with the fractieyoorzitters,” the party leaders. And, of course, receptions are important in The Netherlands. I could say I thought it'd be good if Bill Tyler had lunch privately with one of these floor leaders. Well, I would be told to go ahead, arrange it, and sit in. It was just totally different, like night and day.

Then Cleo got his invitation to return to Khartoum, and Earl and Bill Tyler performed what is sometimes considered a minor miracle; they managed to get a deputy political counselor made a political counselor. It's not easily done. So I had three great years in The Hague as political counselor. And that was really just a wonderful experience, marred only by the awful Vietnam issue.

Q: I was going to ask. The Dutch more or less parallel the Swedish experience as far as our time in Vietnam.

NORLAND: Well, except their attitude was greatly tempered by their loyalty to NATO. They were torn: they did not want to do anything that would weaken NATO; and they did not want to do anything that would weaken NATO's backbone, which was, in a sense, the United States. So, even within the Dutch Foreign Ministry, you had two quite different attitudes. You had those who said, “Look, don't be tough on the Americans. We need them desperately.” And you had others who said, “But the Americans are hurting themselves. They're weakening their own ability to perform this role.” So you had a somewhat pacifist anti-American group in the Foreign Ministry that was saying, “Let's tell them honestly how we feel. Let's not just roll over and accept whatever they tell us.” It was a painful period. I knew people on both sides, and I tried to be a link between them and to be honest, but it was difficult.

Q: Were we having trouble with the students at that time?

NORLAND: Yes.

0064

Q: It wasn't just the Vietnam issue; they seemed to be a problem for the Dutch, too, weren't they? They seemed to be a force unto themselves.

NORLAND: The students were not a major force in The Hague. They were a problem in Amsterdam, particularly. This was the age of drugs, LSD, and the youth culture, an anti-Vietnam spirit took the form of experimentation. It was regrettable. One Dutch political party formed during this time represented a sizable segment of Dutch youth. It was called D-66. Have you heard of it?

Q: No.

NORLAND: Democrats '66. And a young man named Hans Van Mierlo was the leader. He was a casual dresser, which was not customary in The Netherlands. When you came to see people, you were generally formal. He typified this new generation. They presented themselves in the 1966 elections, and actually won some seats, seven or eight out of 150. The atmosphere, even then, was such that a lot of people didn't think it would be proper for the American ambassador to receive Hans Van Mierlo. So it was arranged for them to meet in my house. Otherwise it would be interpreted as being soft on our critics over Vietnam. Well, Bill Tyler agreed to come and talk with him. Bill charmed him, and we had good relations from then on.

Peter Dankert, a young Socialist married to a Frenchwoman (who was suspected of being a leftist), was Socialist spokesman on foreign policy and NATO affairs. He was quite ambivalent about how firmly the Dutch Socialist Party should support our NATO policy. But we remained in contact and had long discussions. It was great fun.

So the issue was a terrible impediment to the kind of relations that they wanted and we wanted but that we couldn't have.

Q: Were there any issues other than Vietnam that were a problem either in the United Nations or dealing with the former Dutch Netherlands East Indies and that sort of thing?

NORLAND: Yes, there had been.

Q: But at the time you were there.

0065

NORLAND: Yes, there was a residue of that epoch. Luns never forgave Robert Kennedy for having pushed the United States, especially the United Nations, into forcing the Dutch out of what was New Guinea.

Q: New Guinea, Irian.

NORLAND: West Irian.

But I have to mention one other thing that preoccupied me during this time, and it illustrates this ambivalence in the Dutch view. NATO and its many manifestations—bases, logistical areas, PXs—having been forced out of France, the call went out: “Where else in Europe can we install some of these bases?” The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated areas of the world, and yet the Dutch came through and offered us two major bases: one, called Soesterberg, where they actually put in an Air Force unit; and another base in the south, called Bussum, where there was a Southern NATO Command. So, on the one hand, we had fruitful discussions. I can even remember the names of the Dutch pro-NATO, pro-U.S. people who said, “Well, this is more important than niggling you on Vietnam.” We received, in almost record time, Dutch agreement to the bases. We didn't have long, acrimonious discussions about what would be done. The Dutch virtually wrote it and we signed it. We had people moving into the bases in a matter of months.

I thought at one time that was going to be my greatest achievement in the Foreign Service, having succeeded in laying the groundwork for this rather rapid acceptance of NATO bases by the Dutch. I made the initial contact and the initial request. Bill Tyler followed up.

But the Dutch accepted the bases despite the crowded conditions. We had a PX at Soesterberg. One of the rituals of the wives was to get into the car once a week and drive this harrowing autobahn some fifty miles to Soesterberg Air Base, where the kids would go along because there they could find American comics, American candies and that sort of thing.

There were other important discussions; for example, on the NPT, the Nonproliferation Treaty. The Dutch wanted this very much, and they wanted to go even further than we. They had real experts; one of them was Terwisscha Van Scheltinga, Mr. NPT. And he was also very Dutch; he was not going to accept anything unless it was clear that the “i's” had been dotted and the “t's” crossed. But we talked and by '68, he was ready to go along. His desire to carry this even more deeply had been appeased. And the Dutch were enthusiastic supporters of the NPT.

0066

There were other issues where the Dutch would have taken issue with us but, generally speaking, it was wonderful. If we could only have escaped Vietnam. It was embarrassing. You'd bring in high-powered Americans who had just returned from Vietnam and who were saying, “Give us an audience and we will convince them that we are winning, that we have the situation under control, that it would be wrong to give up now, that our credibility is at stake.” And, I had to sit and listen to this. A couple of journalists, one of whom just died, Dries Ekker, a highly responsible journalist, had a weekly column. It was all we could do to hold him from making significant attacks against U.S. policy. We never convinced him, but he did hold off, didn't say the worst. We saw him and his wife often; they were wonderful people.

Q: I take it that within our embassy—you and others—there was no feeling of support for the Vietnam War.

NORLAND: Within the embassy?

Q: Yes.

NORLAND: That was a very interesting story. We had an economic counselor, my counterpart, Emmerson Brown. Did you ever run into Em Brown?

Q: Yes, I met him.

NORLAND: He had the guts to stand up in staff meetings and say, “This is folly. This is ridiculous.” And we were all finding ways, because we didn't want to be too divided between internal attitudes, where we would agree with him, and then go out and say something different. I regret that I followed the American line pretty regularly and told Em I was sorry I just couldn't agree with him. I should have agreed with him; I should have acknowledged he was right.

Incidentally, there was a breakthrough about 1968. I'd been there four years. We had the visit of Clark Clifford. Clifford and Bill Tyler had known one another (Bill knew everybody), and the day or so after the visit Bill took me aside and said, “You know, I had a talk after dinner last night” (there were thirty people or so at dinner)...

Q: Clifford was, at that point...

NORLAND: Secretary of Defense.

0067Q: He had been brought in by Johnson.

NORLAND: Right. And Bill said, “Clifford told me afterward that he has the greatest reservations about Vietnam, that he is working to get the United States out.” Here we are, officially told that our policy is the same, yet Clifford didn't believe in it. It was just a shame that we couldn't have changed policy earlier. I feel I owe Em Brown apologies for having not stood up for him and said, “You know, you're right, Em.” One of his arguments was: We're not paying for this as we go along, which is exactly what it turned out to be a few years later. But there we were. This was the problem of conscience versus duty.

Then Vice President Hubert Humphrey also came to visit. He was not enthusiastic about the war, but at the same time, he wasn't saying anything publicly about it. Too bad.

Q: Then you went to Stanford for a year, from '69 to '70, which must have been rather difficult. What were you doing there?

NORLAND: I was free. I was called a senior fellow. I had an office in the Hoover Institution Building, and it was Hoover-sponsored. I'd been five years in The Netherlands, and there was effervescence, instability in the world. I went out there with the intention of studying revolution.

My focus was on revolution in the student body; they were massing and demonstrating. They even threw rocks through my office window. I have pictures of my office window broken by student rioters. Through the provost, a man named Brooks, as I recall, I asked for permission to get inside this student movement. And he assigned me to a sociology professor named Sanford Dornbusch (spelled just like his counterpart at MIT, Rudiger Dornbusch). He was a sociologist, and he was the faculty advisor to the students against the war, SDS.

Q: Students for a Democratic Society.

NORLAND: Right. They were organizing large rallies in San Francisco. Students from Stanford were very much a part of that movement. Sandy Dornbusch was kind enough to let me sit next to him at several of the organizing meetings; I heard the students, and got a chance to talk with them. My conclusions are in a paper which I wrote at the time, November 1969, in which I said, “These students have no foreign-policy philosophy. They are not involved in the global ideological battle. They are against the war. I have had three months' exposure to them, and I'm giving them up. I'm not going to pay any further attention.” So I just abandoned that research and focused on theories of revolution.

0068Q: Well, it's an interesting thing. As a Foreign Service officer, I think maybe you've had the same experience, that you have these very ideological students around the world who get involved, and in America, with this one Vietnam exception, and there, you might say, because the students, in a way, were on the line, because they were being drafted. But, other than that, you don't seem to get that same ideological cast. I remember I was in Italy when, was it Marcuse...?

NORLAND: Yes, Herbert Marcuse.

Q: ...died, and he was teaching at San Diego. This was headline news in Italy, and it was a little blip on the radar in the United States, although he was teaching there. He was a great ideologue for the left. I wonder, having dealt with the students in The Netherlands and other times, did you get any feel for this look of why American students don't seem to have the same cast?

NORLAND: It's a good question. One of the answers is that the war was an overwhelming issue, and in order to cast the widest possible net of supporters, they didn't put ideology at the top. They focused on opposition to the war and anything that would enhance the importance of their movement. There were some people, obviously, under the influence of Soviet sympathizers; but the organizers were wise enough to see that it could have been a source of weakness if they were seen as taken over by pro-Communists. They had a platform that was so much stronger without Communist rhetoric. There was no reason for them to compromise on that level. I wish I could remember the chants, the slogans that they decided to write on placards and hold up while they marched—a hundred thousand people on one of those occasions—and all against the war. There was nothing about undermining the structure of the U.S. government or institutions; strictly an antiwar emphasis. So I didn't get bothered by it.

While I was there, I did come into contact with a European philosopher by the name of Eric Voegelin, who was working on the third volume of a study of history comparable to Toynbee's, but maybe more erudite; it may even last longer. I took a seminar on revolution with him. We were reading Hanna Arndt and Lenin and other thinkers. But he had a perspective on the subject of revolution that just fascinated me. I did a paper on that, too. I tried to get it published in the Foreign Service Journal, but it was too philosophical; it wasn't the kind of thing they wanted. I called it: “Philosophy, Fantasy, and Foreign Affairs.” Voegelin was extremely perceptive; I can still remember his major theses. And I got to know him personally. I had tea with him and got acquainted with his wife.

0069

Incidentally, also in our office complex was Bertram Wolfe, who authored the book, “Three Who Made a Revolution,” who himself had been a Communist and had interviewed Trotsky. We used to have occasions to talk and get his analysis of these student movements. Of course, he pooh-poohed it. Voegelin, a student of revolution, also didn't think the student movement was worth much attention.

Are you interested in Voegelin?

Q: Probably we'd better not.

NORLAND: It's a little bit erudite. But it was a good experience.

And, incidentally, my office mate there was John Negroponte, who had just come out of his Vietnam experience highly frustrated, and was given a year before being dispatched to Ecuador as political counselor. He had run into Henry and taken issue with him.

Q: You're talking about Henry Kissinger.

NORLAND: Right. John and I shared some enjoyable experiences. We played tennis regularly. Another historian there, Berkeley Tompkins, was teaching at the university. The author of “People of Plenty,” whose name escapes me right now [Potter] was a wonderful historian. My wife audited his course. So we had a good experience, and the study of revolution was something that I was glad to have done. It helped me by enabling me to evaluate revolutionary movements.

Q: I think this is of course one of the things that stands a Foreign Service officer in good stead, because you're able to observe your own country. You have to, really, to represent it abroad, to understand, particularly in a time of major changing of political tides and all that, to have had that experience.

NORLAND: And to get the perspective of a European philosopher, who headed the Max Weber Institute in Munich for a long time, who was extraordinarily erudite, was an experience. For him Plato was a living figure. He brought such depth to it. He thought in terms of cycles of one hundred years, two hundred years, instead of five or ten years. It was useful. We lived on campus in student housing called Escondido Village. Again, it was dominated and distorted by the Vietnam War. The Cambodian bombing occurred in the spring. Awful.

Q: You were mentioning there was something you wanted to add about your time in Abidjan.

0070

NORLAND: I can't imagine that if we had done a complete record we would have omitted some of the people who were there. Among them was Brandon Grove, who was vice consul. The most important person in my life at the time was Marion Markle, a most faithful, competent, devoted, agreeable, uncomplaining, motivated person. I hate to say it, but in those days we even permitted ourselves the luxury of asking people in the embassy to babysit. On one occasion she babysat for my family; I think maybe all three. But, you know, we could count on her. It's something I'm afraid we can no longer rely on. I would love to see her service recognized. And I was very sorry that we never had occasion to serve again together. She was a model person at a difficult post at a difficult time. She adapted. I don't think she was ever comfortable in Abidjan, but her dedication to the job was a model for all.

Q: Well, in 1970, you went back to Africa. Had you been making African noises?

NORLAND: Yes. And Earl Sohm was very prominent in the personnel system at the time, and I had been in correspondence with him. We tried to get something other than West Africa, but this was the only thing that was available. So we were assigned to Conakry, Guinea.

The problem at this point was that our two sons were out of elementary and at the junior high level and could not accompany us. My daughter, on the other hand, did come and attended an international school there. (I think there were eighteen students and fourteen nationalities.) But we had to arrange for the boys to go to the American School of Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, for the first year, and then to Mount Hermon, in Massachusetts, for the second year.

Conakry was another example of what we've talked about. I don't know how much detail you want. It was an extraordinarily demanding post, for the simple reason that the president belongs on the list of tyrants of the twentieth century. That is Sekou Tour�. He aspired to be a Leninist. His outer office was filled with his own works, and, in addition, works by Lenin. Even though he was a Muslim and did not believe in subordinating Guinea's interest to the Soviet Union in any respect, he was ideologically very close to that country.

An event occurred on November 22, 1970 that transformed the whole assignment. Not many people remember it, namely the invasion by Portuguese naval forces and commandos of the capital of Guinea, Conakry. The invasion began on the morning of the 22nd. We were obliged to remain in our houses, but the shooting went on during a good many hours over two days coming from the ships offshore. I saw them with my own eyes; this was not imaginary. I went from looking at those ships with binoculars to consulting Jane's Fighting Ships; I could identify the ships as being part of the Portuguese navy. So for me there was no question about this.

0071Q: Before we get to this, in the first place, you went to Conakry as the deputy chief of mission. You arrived when, and what was the situation when you arrived?

NORLAND: Arrived in July of 1970. The ambassador was already there, another great Foreign Service figure, Albert W. Sherer. He had come from Togo, but he had spent five years before that in Poland. He was really an Eastern European specialist. He'd been assigned to Czechoslovakia before that. A man of great dignity and perceptiveness and a wonderful boss. I remember the first day; he handed me a paper which I still have somewhere, saying, “Here's how I view the relationship between the ambassador and the DCM. You will do the following things; in effect, you'll run the embassy, and I will conduct high-level contacts and negotiations, except where we agree that you will do it.” And it was a marvelous setup.

But the situation was bad even then. We'd had constant problems with suspicions about Americans. This was a time of great troubles in Guinea, and the leader, S�kou Tour�, was looking for a scapegoat. For example, he did not trust the Germans. One of them lived next door to us, i.e. the German DCM, named Walter le Walter.

Q: Which Germans were these?

NORLAND: These were West Germans. There were also East Germans around. They were in a compound, isolated on the edge of town. Almost from the time of our arrival, the West German ambassador was accused of having conspired against Guinea. This was a time when the Catholic archbishop, whose name was Tchidimbo, was accused of conspiring against Guinea. You had one person after another in the business community accused, sometimes publicly, of being anti-Guinean. It was a terrible atmosphere. The number of these cases was multiplied almost indefinitely, resulting in a siege mentality.

Q: What was the situation in Guinea that was causing all these problems?

NORLAND: One of the problems was that the economy was going very badly; things had deteriorated. And when you have a very poor economy and you are making all the wrong decisions as to how to remedy it, you can no longer blame people within the country; you start to blame foreigners.

0072

At the same time, there was some provocation from outside. S�kou Tour� had allowed the PAIGC (the liberation movement for Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau; PAIGC stands, in Portuguese, for the Party for Independence of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau) to establish its headquarters on the outskirts of Conakry. The Portuguese were constantly accusing Guinea of assisting the liberation movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, which, of course, they did. So the Portuguese were undoubtedly sending in observer spies, trying to recruit Guineans, who were otherwise angry at S�kou Tour� because the situation was deplorable, especially the economic situation. We couldn't get food, so we organized a weekly flight from Brussels, on Sabena Airlines, that was our lifeline for fresh fruits and vegetables. This despite the fact the country was wealthy. It had great potential, including mineral resources. There was a mountain in the north, near a town called Bok�, that consisted of bauxite. The Russians had a bauxite operation about seventy-five miles from the capital. The French had long exploited Guinean bauxite, for forty years perhaps. The French company was called Fria. Fria transformed bauxite to alumina because of the abundance of hydropower. Guinea is mountainous. It has the headwaters of six major river systems, including the Niger. It has climatic variations that made it agreeable. We were only able to get upcountry once. But in the old days, American missionaries from all of West Africa used Kankan, a city in the far eastern section of Guinea, for rest and recreation.

Q: Sort of like Simla or something like that.

NORLAND: Exactly. They had adequate accommodations and opportunities to recover from the heat and humidity of Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and other places.

S�kou was in a mood that can only be described as paranoiac and xenophobic. He was irrational. And he was trying to build momentum for his party. The more the people resisted, the more he implored and cajoled them. We attended one political rally after another. S�kou insisted that the diplomatic corps attend most of these functions.

The Chinese had built a Palais du Peuple, which seated probably twenty-five hundred people. It was beautiful, very well done. It had only been inaugurated a few years earlier. Whenever a high-ranking person came to town, there would be a reception and a gathering at the Palais du Peuple, where S�kou would speak.

From time to time this was interesting and entertaining. There would be local dances, and Miriam Makeba would sing. Miriam Makeba was, at the time, married to Stokely Carmichael, and they were living in Guinea. We used to attend the same dinners; some people thought it useful to bring them together with Americans. Stokely later changed his name to Kwame Tour�. Miriam was a delightful person. Of course, her singing enchanted us all.

0073

But S�kou's attempt to mobilize the people by means of the party, the PDG (Parti D�mocratique Guin�e) led to excesses. And one would sit in that auditorium and listen to long speeches. At one point, S�kou actually made a seven-hour speech—four hours with an intermission and then three more. It was the same old rhetoric.

I'll never forget a Swedish diplomat happened to be visiting, and saw how the system operated. S�kou changed the language. You were not allowed, when you picked up the telephone, to say “bonjour” or say “monsieur.” The first words you had to utter were “Pret pour la r�volution” (ready for the revolution). This is not imagination; it was real. Anyone could be accused of conspiring, even for not answering the telephone in a certain way. It was “Pret pour la r�volution,” and then talk about your business. Everybody was being monitored. The atmosphere was tense, really disagreeable.

Q: What were American interests in this country?

NORLAND: Our principal interest was that ALCOA and ALCAN together with a German, an Italian and a French company, had developed a consortium called the CBG (Compagnie des Bauxites de Guin�e), which was going to exploit that mountain of bauxite at Bok� in the north of the country. The big new operation, in addition to Fria and the Russians, was to be exploited jointly with the Americans of ALCOA to be the operating company. Operating personnel came from Pittsburgh. So we had the challenge of helping get CBG into operation. There was a need to identify a Guinean to be the front man acceptable to S�kou Tour�, and able to bring the Guinea government along and make it possible for the operation to succeed. The World Bank helped enormously. The Guinean ambassador to the United States in the early Sixties, for five years was Karim Bangoura, described in one of Dean Rusk's memoirs as being the most effective foreign ambassador in the United States at the time. He helped get the World Bank loan that enabled the CBG to go forward. He had completed his tour here and returned to Guinea where he became minister of transport. We used to see him. But he had to discourage us from coming around to see him, because of this terrible suspicion that S�kou Tour� had that foreigners were recruiting Guineans as spies. In November '70, Bangoura was arrested and later killed.

Q: Well, tell me, under these circumstances, what were you and the embassy telling the ALCOA people? From what you're telling me, it sounds like it was the sort of place to say, “Well, is it really worth it to you to do this?”

0074

NORLAND: It was worth it. They felt they had the markets. They had the bauxite under an arrangement that was well out of town: It was a hundred and fifty miles to Bok� and the port of Kamsar, where the bauxite would be loaded. And they felt that they could somehow work with the local authorities. Through a Guinean, whose name was Marcel Cros, a relative of S�kou Tour�'s, they felt they could somehow arrange for immunity from this terrible paranoia. And CBG didn't have much interest in getting too close to us, for that reason.

But we were very frank. We told them the situation was uncertain. Yet, in many ways, they knew more about it than we did, because they were in daily contact with the people in the north on whom they depended for so many things. And it was in the interest of Guinea to make this operation go, because, as was predictable, within a few years bauxite from this one plant would account for about eighty-five percent of Guinea's foreign exchange.

S�kou desperately wanted that revenue; he had very little else in the way of support for his government.

But he did have a country with resources, and if it weren't for his incredibly paranoid mentality, that country could have succeeded. Many a high-ranking American came, saw the country and its economic potential, its mineral resources, water and land, and declared that Guinea would no doubt be one of the success stories of Africa.

I can give you the names of at least two assistant secretaries who came out, who were terribly impressed by S�kou Tour� and who said, “This guy has found the secret for erasing tribalism.” Guinea is torn by something like thirty tribes, but there are three main groups. One is in the north; one in the south, from which S�kou came; and then the coastal tribe. We had people who were absolutely overwhelmed by this man's rhetoric. He was a brilliant orator, no question about it.

Then cholera broke out. We were told this was the first time cholera had broken out in Africa in many years. Why? Because the level of infrastructure in the city was so bad. And S�kou Tour� refused to admit that it was cholera. We had the WHO people who wanted to come to Guinea to verify it, and at first he wouldn't let them come in. When they came in, he wouldn't let them take their equipment or findings out.

It's difficult to imagine the scope of this man's political hold on the country, and his paranoia. It was a never-never land.

Q: Were the Soviets, the East Germans, the Communist Chinese playing on this?

0075

NORLAND: Yes, and they overplayed it. The Soviets had their ambassador thrown out twice. They interpreted S�kou's language as meaning that they could override the bureaucracy and do what they wanted to do, so he threw them out. There was that element of independence in spite of this terrible atmosphere. I can't begin to tell you how difficult it was.

Q: How did it work for the embassy staff there?

NORLAND: We hunkered down. As a matter of fact, I came across a card the other day: How to behave in a roadblock. This came after the invasion but, even before, people were setting up roadblocks and shaking you down. There were areas of town where you could not go, could not drive. One of the areas (just a little footnote) was on the south corniche, bordering on the Atlantic, where Nkrumah had been given a house...

Q: This was after he'd been...

NORLAND: After he'd been deposed. Nkrumah was pronounced as the co-president of Guinea at one point. Do you remember that?

Q: Yes.

NORLAND: He lived there, you could not go near it. If you came near it, they'd shoot at your car. You'd had to detour around; it was a pain in the neck.

And then the cholera. We had a medical doctor, a resident there named Dr. Jassie. We didn't have an effective vaccine, so we had meetings of the whole staff; I remember one in the garage, where we got everybody together, and the doctor was telling people to protect themselves against cholera. “Be sure to keep clean, and eat bananas.” This was his antidote to cholera. No Americans got it, but it was a difficult time.

We have other people who should really be interviewed before they forget. One of them is Johnny Young, who was our administrative officer, a young officer at the time. He's now the head of Personnel. He came back from Sierra Leone about six, eight months ago, where he'd been ambassador. But Johnny and Angie Young were there, and they suffered along with all of us. Some others did not want to stay. Bud Sherer sent a telegram to the Department saying, “Because of conditions here, I've got to make this offer that anyone who wants to leave will be allowed to leave.” And we had one person who left.

Macomber (M) was furious. He said, “You're not the personnel system out there. You've got to go through us. We can't allow this to happen.”

0076

Bud Sherer stood up and said, “Look, we don't want anybody out here at this time who is not willing to endure this thing with us.”

Because of steady leadership like Bud Sherer's morale wasn't too bad.

Every time you had a Guinean contact, though, you had this feeling that you might be hurting the person you were talking to.

Q: You were running the embassy, but obviously you were taking over from him, and you had the political officer or economic officer. How did you operate?

NORLAND: We would certainly not go out and make random contacts. We would almost always go through the established procedure, which was go to Protocol, register, and then be actually accompanied, in many cases, by the Protocol Office to the person that you wanted to see. And we conducted our business in a very official way, very much like the Soviet Union during those years.

The economic officer was a guy, now retired, named Ollie Jones (E.O. Jones); he lives up in Dover, Mass. He spent much of his time covering the port. I remember he used to get out there and talk to people coming off ships, wanting to see the town or whatever, and he would find out why they were there. He would follow the bauxite operation through the offices of CBG in Conakry. Just sort of taking what you could. It was not well organized reporting of the kind you would want.

And we had the Agency (CIA) there. They had quite a lot to do. In addition to the countries you just mentioned, there were diplomats from Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. It was the Czechs or East Germans, one of the two, who succeeded in planting a small listening device in a drawer of the desk in the ambassador's office. There was an apartment house about 50 feet from the ambassador's office window which triggered the device.

Q: We're talking about fifty feet.

NORLAND: They had a way of activating the listening device in the drawer of his desk from that apartment house which they'd rented. I don't know how public the story is; I've seen it in security briefings. But it provides an example of the atmosphere and the work of many of the East Bloc countries. We were not allowed to talk to the Russians, even though they had a compound just a few hundred yards from the ambassador's residence. We could see them on the beach, like us, until the 22nd of November.

0077Q: Okay, this was about five months after you had arrived.

NORLAND: That's right.

Q: Had anything led up to this?

NORLAND: It came as a surprise to us. And that's not an unimportant part of the story; the shooting first erupted one morning. We telephoned around and asked what was going on. Miraculously, the phone system, or the internal radio system, worked throughout. Everyone was asked to stay home. Bud Sherer telephoned to Washington and we got a few reports out. But we just hunkered down.

Q: What was this all about?

NORLAND: On the one hand, it was about the efforts of the Portuguese to destroy the headquarters of the PAIGC. A second objective was to use some dissident Guineans that the Portuguese had recruited and attack the largest prison, which was right on the water's edge, called Camp Boiro. The goal was to release some Guinean opposition who had been imprisoned there by S�kou Tour�. Part of the evidence is that they burned one of S�kou's residences just a quarter of a mile from where we lived, on the north edge of town.

But there are some mysteries. I would love to do a story about the Portuguese invasion. Nobody has ever taken much time to look into it. It's a historical footnote nobody pays attention to. But for us it was a very important...

Q: Well, how did it play out?

NORLAND: The invaders came and spent probably about eighteen hours in Conakry. S�kou mobilized what he could in the way of military opposition. His luck was such that he was not in that residence on the edge of town. The invaders succeeded in releasing some prisoners and rowed them out to the ships. They attacked the old radio station. They missed the new one. Their intelligence was defective; they didn't know where key officials lived. There were a few skirmishes. The invaders returned to their ships and sailed away. And then all hell broke loose.

Q: Did you mention about the headquarters of this...

0078

NORLAND: Yes, they hit the PAIGC headquarters, but didn't destroy it. They didn't capture PAIGC leaders, one of whom was Amilcar Cabral. He was a real hero, someone that I was able to talk to on the fringes of receptions. I was not allowed to meet with him officially because he represented a liberation movement we didn't recognize. The only thing the Portuguese destroyed was this large presidential residence.

The most important consequence was to confirm the paranoia of S�kou Tour�. Life was difficult up to then; thereafter it became almost impossible.

I might recall some of the things that occurred during and after the invasion. For example, we had Peace Corps volunteers. The one American casualty was a Peace Corps volunteer who was driving back along the beach road just after the invasion began. He was stopped at a roadblock by the Portuguese. Our understanding was that he was about to be released when Guineans defenders apparently tried to contest the roadblock. Our PCV (Scott) got caught in cross fire and was wounded. This caused quite a stir, as you can imagine. We had a medical doctor to care for him, and then he was evacuated. Within days, all the Peace Corps volunteers were gone. We didn't have an AID operation resident at the time. Then the roadblocks were set up.

And they also instituted something which I'm sure that people will never really believe, and that's why people like Johnny Young and others ought to be interviewed so they can attest to what I'm going to say. They stationed soldiers about every hundred yards on the beach. This was the Atlantic Ocean. And they would not allow anyone to walk on the beach. So, for the remainder of our tour, with few exceptions, we'd not feel safe to walk out from our house to the beach. We would not dare to go out on the rocks near the water.

We were not allowed to travel in the interior. I made one trip out of town, to Kankan, and one trip to a waterfalls. Other than that, we were forced to remain within the city limits of Conakry from November 22, 1970, until I left in about August of 1972. We flew out for R&R, in the summer of 1971. Other than that, it was virtually a prison.

What made it tolerable was that the Department was soon able to see that we were not able to operate, to do anything. We were confined to our quarters, confined to the city. All our actions were suspect. We had roadblocks everywhere.

Fortunately, Bud Sherer had a very good friend as Director General, who said, “We're obviously not making use of your talents. We'll develop a plan here where we will use your talents”

Q: John Burns, was it?

0079

NORLAND: No, actually it was another officer whose name will come to me. But he said, “We need an ambassador to Czechoslovakia. We will bring you (Sherer) back and make it appear as though it is dissatisfaction with the way we're being treated. The Guineans will never know the difference.”

David Newsom, then assistant secretary of state for African affairs, came to Abidjan for a conference. I was sent to Abidjan, that's another time I got out of the country. I was asked to explain the plan. He was not in favor of it. I don't know why. David was basically conservative, as you know. I'm sure you've talked with him at length.

But the Department eventually approved. And the result was that Bud Sherer said goodbye to S�kou Tour� and left in early 1971. He slipped out, spent some time in the Department, and went on to Czechoslovakia.

I was made charg� d'affaires. To emphasize how much a “charg�" I was, I was authorized later to move into the residence. I stayed there almost a year, which made my year there a lot more comfortable. We were living in what was known as the paillote, an enlarged thatched hut. It was a Frenchman's idea of how to adapt local architecture for modern needs. Instead of a hut twenty feet across, it's a hundred feet across. But you have the same conical roof and the same thatch. That was where the DCM normally lived, so we were glad for the opportunity to live in the residence.

We cut staff to a total of eight Americans and hunkered down.

By early '72, the Guineans were suffering deeply; some say there was a threat of starvation. And Guineans came to us and said, “Look, we'd like to have resumption of PL 480 food.” I remember I didn't even ask for instructions. I went to see the Minister in question and said, “Did I really hear you correctly? You are asking the country which, according to your newspaper, is imperialist, neocolonialist, subtly attempting to subvert your government, you're asking the U.S. government to give you food aid? I cannot believe it.” And the Minister (named Keita) was obviously taken aback. He started the government line. “It is not the government that's saying those things. We don't believe them. That propaganda is not the government's view.”

This was kind of a breakthrough. They realized they were in such desperate straits that they had to change policy

Q: Why couldn't the Soviets...?

0080

NORLAND: Because the Soviets were not themselves able to offer grain or come up with the resources needed. That's a logical question, and I'm sure that we probably even alluded to it at the time. I can't remember ever putting the Soviets forward; that would have been contrary to our basic instincts.

Q: Were we really interested?

NORLAND: The answer is we were still fighting the Cold War. Believe me, this was an active arena of the Cold War confrontation in Africa.

Q: Who gave a damn, really?

NORLAND: Well, Cold Warriors were wholly in charge of the U.S. government. Henry Kissinger was the national security advisor. And we had one Cold Warrior after another come through. The CIA was interested in what we were doing. They had two people there. We had a specialist who came out because the Guineans actually went to the trouble of developing disinformation. They claimed they had a telegram implicating the U.S. in anti-Guinean propaganda. I can remember the handwriting specialist saying, “This was put together by the Soviets.” We had some things going. The East Germans were active. Bloc countries were active.

Q: Looking at it with not an awful lot of perspective, you kind of wonder what was all the fuss about.

NORLAND: Well, here's the global strategic view of the time: that the Soviets were using a base at Conakry for refueling their surveillance air missions over the South Atlantic. Guinea became a pawn in the Cold War. And one of the real achievements of Bill Harrop, was to get S�kou Tour� to have Russian use of Conakry for refueling those flights. We're only sixteen or seventeen years from this, but you have to recreate the mentality of the time.

Q: Were we extracting any concessions from the Guineans as far as our living conditions there? “We'd like to be able to travel around; don't do this to us.”

NORLAND: We were fighting at the time to get reciprocal restraints imposed on Guineans, in this country. And we didn't. That was one of the things that made us mad. I remember being very angry about the failure of Kissinger to press for what we thought would be a natural counter-action.

0081Q: It wasn't until the Reagan administration that we really...

NORLAND: That we implemented certain reciprocal actions that made it seem that we meant what we said. Meanwhile, we sat out there. The instructions from Washington were: “Don't do anything that will create a stir. There is only one person and only one agenda that is to get any publicity—Henry Kissinger's.” I got that from many people. Remain low key; don't do anything or say anything publicly even if it's anti-Tour�.

When I had occasion to meet with Tour�, introduce visitors and so forth, I held our ground. This is one of my most pleasing moments, i.e. standing up to him. I understood when he would say, “Your country has been a part of this conspiracy,” I would say, “Mr. President, I can assure you that is not true.” And he would say, “But you are in NATO, Portugal is in NATO, and their ships were out there. How could you not know?” And I said, “I don't accept that there was a failure of communications if that's what you're suggesting. I can assure you that this embassy was not aware.” That's all we could say, because it was true. “Maybe somebody in NATO knew where those ships were but not Embassy Conakry.”

NORLAND: Navy people pay attention to ship movements generally. How those ships could have slipped out of Portugal to Guinea-Bissau, waited there, and then launched this operation, how they could have done this without any of our spy operations detecting it, I don't know. But we did not know. We never convinced S�kou of this.

So we sat there, and we waited them out.

Q: You were seeing S�kou Tour� personally. Was he a madman? How was he?

NORLAND: He was an obsessed man. He was a man who demanded total obedience. It was unbelievable. He would treat everybody in his entourage in a way that left them frightened.

One example came during these so-called party congresses, when he would make a speech. The tradition was when Tour� arrived you'd stand and applaud. Not applaud calmly, but vigorously. There were confirmed reports that after about eight or nine minutes of applause, one of the ministers in the front row appeared to stop and sit down before any of the others. He was dismissed. There are reports that he was killed as a result.

0082

Another occasion, school children were being bussed to school. The buses detoured because three people were hanging by their necks from the bridge in the center of town. And one of them was a woman, by the way. Rather intimidating, you might say.

Frankly, I didn't think Tour� would dare move against us, partly because of Bok�, but also because I felt I could see through him. When you meet some people you're sure they're acting. Self-important is the idiom in French, the way they move, the way they talk, this commanding personal attitude that says, “I'm in charge; I know everything; I'm omniscient and what I say is gospel.” And then he would tell stories that were unbelievable. Unbelievable. One, about having been in an aircraft, falling without a parachute in a tree and being saved. He talked as if he believed it. You'd listen; you couldn't take it that seriously. This pompous, incredibly arrogant behavior reflected real weaknesses and great pretensions.

Later on, by the way, I had an opportunity (this is maybe new) to confirm my impressions. His vice president Saitordage Diallo, who was from the north and was a wonderful gentleman, had contracted TB. He could not get the needed treatment in Guinea, so he asked us, and we said we would be glad to treat him. He came to our dispensary, and Dr. Jassie treated him. I served as interpreter, I greeted him when he drove into the dispensary, and escorted him out. He did this from time to time so I got to know Diallo quite well.

When I left the country in 1972 and came back to Washington, I found the vice president was at NIH, getting treatment for his TB. Partly for personal reasons, because I liked him and I wanted to show an interest, and since I was living in Bethesda, I visited him. After about my second visit, with the nurses out of the room, he said, “You know, I'm ashamed.”

I said, “What would cause you to be ashamed?”

And he said, “My country, with all of its resources, having been brought to this level by that man Tour�.”

And yet, all the time that he was in Guinea, Diallo was standing up next to Tour�. This was confirmation. Even Tour�'s right-hand man saw him as paranoid.

Q: How did S�kou Tour� end his time?

0083

NORLAND: He had a heart attack in 1984, in April. It's true that he began making sounds about changing policies. He came to this country in the early Eighties, for example, was received by the president, and had a meeting with David Rockefeller and a group of American businessmen. The thought was that Americans might consider investing in Guinea if they could be convinced that S�kou had changed his stripes. He was slow to change, but he had to. He was looking to this country for help, as well as to the outside world, much less to the Soviet Union. But Tour� had a heart attack. He was flown to Cleveland in April of 1984, and he died (I understand) in Cleveland.

At that moment, you had two great political rivalries develop between those who wanted somehow to maintain the S�kou Tour� regime and those who were absolutely bound and determined to get rid of it. And that's still playing out. You still have people who say, “Well, you know, he gave us pride, and he gave us standing, and he said no to de Gaulle in 1958.”

A year and a half ago, I asked for my papers from this 1970 to '73 period. I have an African historian who wants to do a biography of S�kou Tour�.

But Guinea had an effect on my perceptions. Fortunately (I mean it) I had had that course on revolution at Stanford. I saw the megalomania, the paranoia, the xenophobia. There was not really intellectual command of world realities. It's shameful that Africa should have been burdened by people like that. He was just as bad, in his own way, as Stalin.

Q: How about Nkrumah? Did he play any part, or was he just given a house?

NORLAND: He was given a house.

Q: And co-presidency.

NORLAND: That's right. By this time, he was ill with cancer. I saw him on several occasions sitting at meetings without being given the chance to say a word, possibly because he was too weak. He died while I was there. We were all invited to participate in a symposium on Nkrumah at the Palais du Peuple.

Q: Oh, my God.

0084

NORLAND: I was the American representative. They say that there's a film that S�kou made of this, and that I'm shown talking a bit about Nkrumah. I had put together a proposed statement and sent it to the Department. The reply was, “No, we don't want to say anything. Cut it way back; just do a paragraph of the usual thing.” Nkrumah died while in Romania receiving medical treatment. He was buried in Guinea, and re-buried recently in Ghana.

Q: Is there anything else that we should cover in Conakry?

NORLAND: Not really, just that we kept going. The people who held out, those eight, including Johnny Young and Madeleine Byron, and others, managed to survive and developed esprit de corps. Great people.

Q: Why don't we stop at this point, and we'll pick up next time, when you went back to the Department?

NORLAND: Fair enough.

Q: This is March 24, 1993, continuing with Don Norland. Don, we got you out of Conakry, and so we've got you, in 1973, coming back to the Department. I wonder if you could tell me what you were up to? I think you got a sort of bipolar assignment when you came back, from '73 to '75.

NORLAND: Actually, I came back in the summer of '72, to the Political/Military Affairs Bureau. In retrospect, I suppose it was useful because the head of the bureau was Ron Spiers and the deputy was Tom Pickering. My immediate boss was Chris Chapman, who had the unenviable task of doing a lot of what I found, after having had considerable responsibility in Conakry, to be fairly mundane and frankly boring. It was not a great period for me.

Q: At that time, what were you and your colleagues doing in Political/Military? How did it interact? I assume that every regional bureau really felt they had most of the action.

0085

NORLAND: Military Assistance and Sales was the office within the P/M Bureau to which I was assigned, and it pretty much was described in the title. We had a staff of about eight people, divided regionally. The individual officers were arranging military assistance programs to various countries. In some cases, they were grants; in other cases, they were sales. It was pretty routine, tedious. My particular job, for much of the time, was to monitor compliance with the Fulbright amendment to the Military Sales Act, which specified that countries receiving American aid would have to pay the equivalent of ten percent of the value of that aid into a fund which we would be able to use. My job was literally to go around and identify the delinquent countries that had not paid the ten percent, to follow up. It was one of the most boring jobs you can imagine. Talk about political work—there was almost nothing there.

One reason we had a relatively quiet tenure was because Spiers and Pickering were almost totally preoccupied with helping pave the way for South Vietnam to receive all the military assistance that we could muster anywhere in the world. And that whole story has been told too many times.

Q: Just one question before we leave that. Was there any questioning by anyone that you were dealing with (you were the new boy on the block and all this) about what we were doing pumping these arms all over the place?

NORLAND: Oh, yes.

Q: Beyond the fact that it helped our balance of payments and made the military feel happy because of savings in quantity and all that sort of thing.

NORLAND: It was so bad that there developed a little esprit de corps among that group of officers who were assigned there. We had to laugh behind their backs. During that time, for example, I saw a copy of the letter that President Nixon sent to the Shah of Iran, saying, in effect, you can have anything you want from our arsenal.

Q: That was the most horrendous thing, really.

NORLAND: You've heard of it, I'm sure. And I knew, from that moment on, that this was a wild operation.

Q: Was anything filtering back, saying what are we going to do with all this?

0086

NORLAND: I don't think anything officially filtered back; I think there were some unofficial questions raised.

Remember, Henry Kissinger was national security advisor at this time, and people were quite aware of the fact that, to question something like this in a memo, was to put your head on the chopping block. I've never been in a Department that was quite as intimidated as that Department of State was during the Kissinger era. And it became worse when he became secretary of state in '73. People were so hypnotized by the Communist threat that even something as egregious as supporting a questionable head of a country, like the Shah, went almost unquestioned. I remember when they geared up to send Agnew over for the two thousandth anniversary of the Persian empire.

This was all out. Behind their backs, we were saying this is out of control. But we were not courageous, I have to say.

Q: Well, then you moved over to...

NORLAND: I got word there would be an opportunity to go into Personnel. I didn't know much about it, but I had a chance. I was given a very warm welcome by people like Bob Stevenson, who was my chief there. I took over the job of helping to develop career training and career assignment paths for political officers at the O-3 level, what used to be O-3. And those people are in the top slots today. I got well acquainted in the Service.

Q: In the old ranks, the O-3 was essentially the colonel level.

NORLAND: That's right; it's FS-1 now. So it was an interesting assignment. I had good people working with me; Sam Bartlett, a wonderful guy; several others, who don't have to be named, I'm sure. And it was at this time that I ran into my old friend Earl Sohm. He had been the DCM in The Netherlands and was one of the smoothest managers that the Department has ever had, absolutely no rough edges with that man. He was very good, and he was, by that time, working for Larry Eagleburger as the deputy in M.

Q: Management.

0087

NORLAND: That's right. In the summer of '75, Earl came to me and said, “Larry is determined to make more efficient the business of managing the Department of State.” Funding allocations, up until that time, were made by a couple of people with green eyeshades, sitting in the basement of the Department. It's hard to believe, Stu, because this was only eighteen years ago, but the idea of linking management resources and policy objectives was still almost unknown. Larry, to his credit, said, “We're going to elevate this process. We're going to expose it to the light of day. We're going to bring it to the seventh floor.”

So, in the summer of '75, I was brought in to be Earl Sohm's deputy and the first head of what they called the Policy Priorities Group (PPG). That was an interesting managerial exercise. I participated in the business of asking the parties most directly concerned...that is to say, assistant secretaries competing for additional funding, to defend their requests. They competed for funds arguing their needs out at Larry Eagleburger's conference table. My job for a time was to summarize the issues—what the EUR Bureau or the Africa Bureau, or the inspector general wanted—and to lay out the key factors. They were discussed, under Eagleburger's chairmanship. There would be a vote by members of the Policy Priorities Group. They included the inspector general, the director general, four or five other ranking people from within the Department. I've never had a better opportunity to observe Department management.

Q: I assume that this also made everybody really decide what they were doing. Rather than just going ahead as we've always done, they had to work on their own priorities. It must have been a sort of revolution.

NORLAND: And those who were the most qualified, those who were the best equipped to explain and to justify their requests, to provide strong reasons for it, were the ones generally who got the funding.

Q: Could you do me a favor? I ask this question once in a while when it seems appropriate, and this is, could you give me, from this perspective, a little ranking of how you found the various bureaus as far as their ability to work within the system and make the...?

NORLAND: Sure. The EUR Bureau was usually outstanding. They always seemed to have not only the most talent, but the most focus. Art Hartman was then assistant secretary. But he had deputies, and his EUR/EX people were good. He always usually had a strong case to present. He stated it, low key, very well.

Other bureaus were not always well focused. The Africa Bureau, for example, was so diverse. To make a convincing case on an integrated, continent-wide basis for one particular post opening or one additional allocation of resources as against another, was more difficult. People didn't know the area. It was very difficult.

0088

I don't have a clear impression of the Asian Bureau.

Latin America was not particularly strong at that time. They had a feisty guy (I'll give you his name afterward, because he's around and I know he's still very good) who was very articulate, very persuasive, but abrasive.

Q: Who was it? It's not going to hurt.

NORLAND: Bob Sayre. Do you know Bob?

Q: No, I don't.

NORLAND: He could sometimes damage his own case. So personalities were very important.

Q: You're really talking about diplomacy and everything else. Were you aware of maybe NEA and EA or something going off in a corner and saying, “You scratch my back; I'll scratch yours.”

NORLAND: It wouldn't have done much good, because in the final analysis, if the issue was significant, they had to lay it out on the table there.

I was amazed that Eagleburger was the person in the annals of the Department, who really brought modern management changes of significance. I have to give him credit.

He also did another thing, which you could find the records on. He brought in management specialists on consultation. I was asked, in some cases, to identify top people in that field. I'd call to the Society for American Public Administration and find out who the big names were in bureaucratic management. One was from MIT, another from San Diego State. They would be brought in about once every three months for a little lunch on the eighth floor. Eagleburger would come in for about twenty minutes and then be called away. But the rest of us, Earl and one or two others, a small group, five or six people, would sit around and pick the brains of this specialist, asking, in effect, what he thought should be done.

So there was a semblance of trying to modernize the Department. That process has only been slightly changed until recent years when it again became personalized. If the secretary wanted it, the secretary got it. From what I understand, that's the way it was under Baker, for example. Eagleburger really introduced a democratic process.

0089Q: But Kissinger was secretary of state during part of this time.

NORLAND: That's right.

Q: Did you find that people were trying end runs, going to the secretary? Or was Eagleburger, being close to Kissinger, able to stop some of this?

NORLAND: It was often through Eagleburger that they were trying to make the end runs. Larry was very loyal, but he was one of those who would stand up to Henry. I happened to have just finished reading the Kissinger biography by Isaacson, and the stories in there reflect my own experience. Once Eagleburger was sitting in a meeting, and the white phone rings. He picked it up, listened, slapped it down, and said, “Henry's just instructed me to fire the entire front office.” Read that book by Isaacson and you'll see this occurred repeatedly. I remember him sitting around one day. Larry was in a thoughtful mood, and somebody said, “Okay, Larry, what do you do in cases like that?”

Larry said, “You wait till morning, and then you feel out the situation, and probably end up not making any changes at all.”

He was an important figure. I was in awe of someone who would stand up like that in the face of temper tantrums. Henry could be brutal; he demoralized the Service, as you know, except for those few people who could stand him.

It was a great management experience. I think I've learned how to manage better as a result.

Q: Well, again, you were watching this. Did you find that there were FSOs who responded to this and other ones who just weren't able to work?

NORLAND: Absolutely. For some, the idea was a new one, that they had to strongly defend claims on resources. Money in turn translated into people, buildings and equipment. For some, to ask for resources was beneath them. They didn't understand that this was a negotiating process, a debate, a discussion that had as its outcome a real result. You'd do a memorandum of the decision, and Larry would be pretty good about seeing it was carried out.

Q: Let me ask a question, because I came up basically through consular ranks, and earlier on, about five or six years before this, all of a sudden the consular people started to put it together in what they called, I think, the packet or something like this, of really putting out what demands there were in the growth and all this, so that they were able to respond quantitatively when everybody else was sort of flying around. Did you find them effective in that time?

0090

NORLAND: I'm sure that a lot of the movement toward quantification of requirements stems from this period where people just wouldn't go along with general requests. To say, “We need this;” or the “host government has asked us for this;” or “our business community says they need it.” You get into specifics: How many requests do you have? What specific benefits will this bring? Can you compare this to some other requirements? A lot of what we do, of course, is in contrast to the consular function, which is a highly quantifiable function.

Q: It's a demand.

NORLAND: It's a demand and a right people have. But from some commercial services, it's hard to quantify. There were a lot of seat-of-the-pants judgments here. But Larry had a good understanding of the Service, and he really did rationalize management and strengthened certain aspects of it. I'm sure you've heard of the control over Personnel that we had in those days. Did you ever hear of Glynn Mays?

Q: No.

NORLAND: I wish I could think of the name of the computer operation that he ran. It contained the names of every American overseas.

The rule then was that the ambassador had to approve any increase in staff. That authority was taken away under the Reagan administration. Why? To make room for more defense attach�s and more CIA. It was a mistake. They're talking about reinstating it now.

It was an effective management tool; Glynn would be there to provide the quantitative data on how many people were at a certain post, and whether an increase appeared justified. You lose control if you don't have a centralized personnel roster.

Q: It must have been an exhilarating time.

NORLAND: It was demanding. I can remember spending weekends and nights assessing the papers that I'd be given by each of the bureaus as to why they wanted additional resources. Larry said, “Don't ever talk more than three or four minutes; point up the differences and the specific decision the PPG has got to make. The question before you is: Should you respond favorably to this or that request, or can you somehow reconcile the two and split the difference?

0091

And, it was thanks to that that I got to know Larry Eagleburger. And it is no mystery in this business that if you don't have that kind of patron, it's hard to be made ambassador. If you want an explanation of how I got to Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland (the BLS countries), in 1976, it lies in this experience.

Q: Well, how did it come about, then?

NORLAND: Well, four years in the Department is considered appropriate. Earl, my dear friend, was sensitized to the fact that I had been in Washington four years. And through his smooth workings, he would nudge Eagleburger and say, “You know, Don has been back here almost four years. I know he's only been here for a year and a half, but he's done his work here.” And Larry was really very generous in his performance evaluations where he was the reviewing officer. He agreed with Earl that the time had come. And my name went up for one Embassy in the summer of 1976. I was close to getting a mission, but they decided, for reasons of balance within the Service, that an administrative officer should get that post. Meanwhile, I had talked with Bill Schaufele, then the assistant secretary in AF. Art Wortzel, who was prominent in the personnel system, was important in helping me. The BLS countries came up, Larry approved my nomination, and I got the assignment.

Q: You served there as ambassador from '76 to '79.

NORLAND: Three years.

Q: What were American interests there?

NORLAND: That's really the question. American interests at that time were much as they are now; but we were not attuned to what was going on in that part of the world. It is just amazing to think that just fifteen years ago we had no hesitation in sending out one person to three countries, all bordering on South Africa. All reflected, in one degree or another, what was going on in South Africa. And our contacts among South African blacks were not good. Contacts endangered blacks. I've had people tell me that Botswana reflected the most accurate source of black public opinion in Southern Africa. As a result of the Soweto riots of June 1976, we had probably a thousand hard-core black-nationalists in Botswana, which was only two hundred and fifty miles northwest of Johannesburg. The riots in Johannesburg were such that it was very uncomfortable for many blacks to stay on. Schools were closed. So we were able to monitor what was going on there, to test reactions and attitudes of these black nationalists, black-liberation-movement representatives.

0092Q: You went out there in '76, which was still Kissinger and all. And then came the Carter administration. Now did you see a major change? Kissinger was renowned for having no real interest in Africa except to see it in an East-West context; you know, Angola or something like that, but only as a reflection of our antipathy towards the Soviet Union.

NORLAND: It was a position that he maintained until April of 1976. He was on a tour of the area and, from what I've heard from insiders, was getting ready to go to Lusaka, capital of Zambia, to give another speech reflecting the policy that South Africa's monopoly on modern, organized military force in this part of the world meant it would remain in charge for the foreseeable future. At least to the end of the century. So we had to work with South Africa; together we were going to confront the onslaught of Communism. I hope someday you'll get the people like Win Lord to give the background. I read the...biography very carefully on this, and it's not clear. But Win Lord apparently got to Henry and said, “You can't give this speech any longer. The forces represented by the black nationalist movements are forces we should be sympathetic to. They are taking much of their rhetoric and much of their philosophy from our own experience; that is to say, human rights, civil rights, the right of self-determination, and so forth.” So in April of '76, Henry's speech changed a little bit. It was nuance, but he did change; he did say that South Africa was going to have to come to terms with events in the world. As I recall, that was the main thrust. But it wasn't more than a little opening.

At that time it was absolutely forbidden for our officials to have official contact with the ANC (African National Congress), the largest of those groups. And the non-ANC black groups were so small they were mere splinters.

We in Gaborone didn't know the refugees were ANC. We just knew that they were blacks from South Africa, and so we contacted them.

It was depressing to hear what they believed and what they thought were the major forces at work in the world, and specifically in South Africa. There was strong pro-Communist ideology. You'd look at the books these people had in their refugee quarters (and I visited some of them, in so-called refugee houses, on the outskirts of town). They'd have a half dozen books; three or four of them would be Lenin, Marx, Castro, or Guevara. We had a problem.

Q: But you were under tight reins then, is that right?

NORLAND: Yes. It was considered provocative to South Africa if we had meetings with the ANC. So people would meet informally, the ANC had a big office in Lusaka, for example. Mutual friends would invite ANC and Americans to the same party, and you'd interact. The CIA got special dispensation. I've never been impressed by their knowledge in this area. But some of our people had made an effort to really get to know the languages and the people, and they would have sustained contacts—but never official.

0093

This was only broken in January of 1987, when Secretary Shultz received Oliver Tambo in the Department of State. That's ten years later. Unbelievable.

Q: When you went out, did you get any instructions about what you were to do and what you weren't to do?

NORLAND: [chuckle] That's a fun question. The country director at the time was Frank Wisner. I put in a request, through Frank, to pay the customary call on Secretary Kissinger before going out. Frank came back and said that it was not necessary to make a call, and that the Secretary only had a couple of things he wanted me to keep in mind. The first was, we don't need any new ideas from the field. We have all the information and all the initiatives we need back here. Secondly, keep a low profile. We do not need any diversion. Maybe Frank extrapolated a bit, but the spirit of the Kissinger era was: There is one focus of public attention, and that is the Secretary. A couple of other things came up along the same line. I wrote them down at the time.

Q: If you ever find them, we can put it in. In a way, it may be true that you don't want too much initiative, but you don't tell people this too much, because it does things... Sometimes the situation can get dangerous, anywhere, and...

NORLAND: Well, that gives me a chance to say that, late in January 1977, after Carter took over, someone whom I had met, Dick Moose...no, he didn't take over immediately, somebody else was the Assistant Secretary. Maybe it was Schaufele still; maybe Schaufele continued. But, anyway, Moose was the person who was already starting to eye Africa. He was in M. He had not found a home there, and went into Africa affairs. The point was that within days after Carter's inauguration, I got a telegram in Botswana asking, “Please submit your ideas on what it is that you think the United States should be doing in Southern Africa at this time.”

I've often used this in talking with junior Foreign Service officers, to make the point that they should always be prepared. You can have people like Henry Kissinger and other know-it-alls who are there temporarily. The most important thing one can do is to prepare for the day that you get an opportunity to say what you think should be said.

I had been thinking about this, knowing that Henry was not going to be there for long, the election having changed the leadership. So I was able to come in with some suggestions. In fact, I came in with some suggestions before the 20th of January 1977. And that rankled Henry greatly.

0094

I'll tell you what it was. It was an attempt to contain the sudden interest of the government of Botswana, a Third World government, only eight hundred thousand people, in arms. They had a tremendously challenging social agenda; they needed to put people to work. But the pressures were mounting in the country, on the president, Sir Seretse Khama, from the three violent struggles going on on its borders: the struggle in Zimbabwe, between the British regime and the nationalist forces, Nkomo and Mugabe; the struggle in South Africa, which was forcing refugees over the border; and the struggle in Namibia. Poor Seretse Khama, one of the brilliant leaders of the Third World, an Oxford graduate, did not want to put the resources of the country into buying arms and aircraft. Yet he was being pressured by his own son, Ian Khama, then a brigadier general, to acquire this arsenal. Why? Because Botswana people were living on these borders, or close to the border—Gaborone itself is only ten miles from the South African border—and sensed the dangers of South African raids. Same thing in Zimbabwe (it was then Rhodesia), where the white military were raiding. So, to protect his population, Khama was being pressed to acquire arms.

When I got there, it was the first thing he raised in the presentation of credentials. We became good friends. He would take this up with me informally as well as formally. He didn't want to arm; we talked about ways of lessening the pressure. The most important pressure at the time was from Rhodesia.

My recommendation to the Department (the unsolicited one while Henry was still there) was to send a signal through South Africa to the authorities in Rhodesia that their actions in violating the border were forcing Seretse Khama to acquire an arsenal, that the United States might not be willing to provide that arsenal, and therefore where would he turn? To the other side.

I felt I had to say, “Let's prevent this arms race from expanding in this part of the world when there are so many other more important priorities of an economic and social nature that should be met. Let's preserve Seretse Khama's desire to keep Botswana from even having a Ministry of Defense.” They had police force, but not a defense establishment.

The first thing I knew, a deputy assistant secretary traveling in the area came up to see me, and said, “Your initiative was not at all appreciated. You shouldn't have gotten involved. What are you trying to do?” Of course, it was perfectly obvious what I was trying to do.

Q: Sure.

NORLAND: And then, when the 20th of January '77 struck, the idea was welcomed and got consideration.

0095

Unfortunately, we were slow to react one way or the other. We weren't going to give them the arms. We weren't going to facilitate the acquisition of arms. We tried to talk them out of it. But eventually we had to help out a little bit. The British helped out. And they did turn to the Soviet Union eventually.

Q: I take it we didn't have any particular commercial or business interests in Botswana.

NORLAND: We had an indirect interest. American Metals Climax of Connecticut had a partial interest in a copper/nickel operation near Selebi-Pikwe, which is halfway to Zambia. That was one investment. We'd actually helped to build a road, the Botzam Highway (Botswana-Zambia Highway), a gravel job. We had indirect interests even in the diamond business. But, of course, the monopoly on diamond mining was De Beers, which had its relationship with the government of Botswana. We had an interest in exploring possibilities, for example, of coal. Shell, which is not U.S., but British and Dutch, was operating there. Some of our companies came out to take a look at the minerals potential. But, you're right, we didn't have much of an interest.

Q: Lesotho and Swaziland, I take it, were really too small to...

NORLAND: In Lesotho, there's almost nothing in the way of resources. Swaziland has got a lot of resources, but the U.S. was not in there; it was South African dominated.

Q: You had three countries, how did you play this?

NORLAND: I was under pressure from particularly Lesotho and Swaziland to spend more time there. My predecessor, David Bolen, did not like Lesotho and apparently did not conceal his lack of interest. He was not comfortable in Swaziland. So he spent most of his time in Botswana. When I got out there, it was in my interest—almost a duty—to try to level this relationship. So I established the practice of spending a week every month in Lesotho, one week a month in Swaziland, and two weeks a month in Gaborone. I'd vary it slightly. But when I was asked where I was resident, I always said, “In this country,” because the Department had residences available in all three. While I was not there they served as housing for TDY communicators or others. But I regularly made the tour. I visited Lesotho some thirty-three times in thirty-six months.

Q: Well, the housekeeping, how did this work? Your main administrative stuff was in Botswana?

0096

NORLAND: The main political activity was in Botswana. But in each of the countries, we had a resident mission; that is to say, there would be about an O-3 DCM, plus a communicator and an administrative officer. We also had AID missions and a USIS operation in all of the countries. When I first got out there, as a matter of fact, the AID mission was centralized in Swaziland as the most agreeable of the three places in which to live. And there was a kind of a division of labor that had been informally developed there. But each of the three posts had a basic infrastructure of personnel and of resources—vehicles and so forth. When I was not there, a charg� was.

You could call the bluff of these various countries, particularly Lesotho and Swaziland, by saying, “I am here for the week. But even if I'm not here, if you will simply inform the embassy of your interest, I will be glad to come back at any time, for any meeting of importance; don't worry about that. Stay in touch.” And, of course, they didn't have much important business with us. Only on one occasion was I asked to go to Swaziland on short notice.

Incidentally, the Department also was kind in authorizing the use of light planes. The embassy in Pretoria had an air attach� aircraft. And they liked to fly over the region to get better acquainted, taking pictures. They eventually got into trouble, as you may remember, and the aircraft, the air attach� and all were thrown out.

The trip was two hours door to door. I would leave one embassy, hop in the plane, and I could be at work in another embassy in two hours. Each was almost exactly four hundred and fifteen miles apart, the three capitals—Gaborone, Mbabane, Maseru—you can see them on your map, almost a triangle crossing South Africa. My wife didn't particularly enjoy flying, and she'd often want to do some shopping, so she would take the car and chauffeur, stop in some South African towns en route before rejoining me. Meanwhile, I'd already done a day's work.

Q: Did any initiatives come out of the Carter administration, from your perspective?

NORLAND: Yes, some of them important. One can hardly exaggerate the importance of the Botswana example in human rights and democratization, something the Carter administration pursued vigorously. At one point, Pat Derian, assistant secretary for human rights and humanitarian affairs, had in mind making a major speech in Gaborone to say just what I said; mainly, that Botswana had paved the way.

I'm proud of the fact that from the moment I arrived and tested the theory of Botswana as a democracy, Botswana stood apart. I tested it going to Parliament, talking with members of the opposition, and asking, “Do you have freedom to speak? Do you fear intimidation? Do you have an independent press? If you make a public speech that's contrary to what the president says, do you have any fear whatsoever?”

0097

And the response was, “No.”

I became confident that Botswana was a democracy—with freedom of expression, movement, religion, and so forth—and that their elections were meaningful, not perfect, but meaningful. And it was rooted in a traditional system called the Kgotla, which means “village council.” Sir Seretse Khama insisted that his ministers campaign between elections, as well as at election time, and explain what the issues were. Even though the people might not always be literate, they had ideas. And there is a tradition in Botswana that says, “A chief is a chief by the will of the people.” That's the foundation of democracy.

This tradition helped set Botswana apart. I couldn't say quite the same about Lesotho or Swaziland. The Botswana experience was the one I stressed, saying this is something we ought to build on.

And the Carter administration (you were asking about initiatives). They weren't inspired by just the Botswana example, but they did make something of human rights. I think they were encouraged by Botswana's success.

Q: What about the other two countries?

NORLAND: Both are monarchies.

During my time in Lesotho, the country was run by the prime minister, Leabua Jonathan. I often call him a Chicago ward politician. He kept saying, for example, how important it was that I spend more time in Lesotho. And I'd ask, “What for? We are giving you more aid than you can usefully use. What do you want me to do?” He came to power by annulling an election, in 1970, seizing power. He wouldn't let go until he was deposed by a military group in 1980.

In Swaziland, there are two separate governments. The monarchy (in my day, Sobhuza II), with a clique of advisors strongly traditional in their actions and attitudes. They hovered around the king down in the valley. Up in the capital, Mbabane, you had a Western government, people in dark suits, etc. The king wore leopard skins, very often. When I presented credentials, he had a feather in his hair, and was in leopard skin. That's where power resided. When you went to the capital, you had these men in three-piece suits but with little power.

We have some officers who can tell you in great detail about Swaziland, Jim Wachob, for example. Do you know Jim?

Q: No, I don't.

0098

NORLAND: I'll ask Jim to come in. No one made a more concerted effort to penetrate Swazi society than Jim Wachob. And yet he will tell you to this day that he had great difficulty.

I went regularly because we had work to do. There were missionaries. We had to reiterate the importance of treating refugees from South Africa correctly, through the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) or bilaterally. The Swazis had special detention camps in the hills. Of course, it's a beautiful country. The economy is evenly divided between agriculture and industry—South African dominated, of course. They have, I think, one of the largest tree growing operations in the world, a great source of wood pulp. They have some mining: coal, asbestos, which is not very popular.

So I made the rounds as best I could, using a combination of activism and dialogue. I would always be seen calling on people, even if I knew I wasn't going to get much in the way of results. It was part of showing the flag, so they couldn't say, “Well, you're in Gaborone. You're spending all your time in Botswana.”

But Botswana had these three wars requiring more attention, more reporting. But I had a good deputy in Botswana, too. Frank Alberti was there for much of the time. Do you know Frank?

Q: Yes, I know Frank.

NORLAND: He had this tragedy, during that time, when his wife, on her way back from Johannesburg for medical appointments, had an automobile accident and was killed.

Q: Oh, I didn't know.

NORLAND: She's buried there. And one son was seriously injured, but he apparently has returned to health.

Frank would do a great job of filling in for me while I was there, seeing the president if necessary. I didn't feel threatened if charg�s were seeing the ranking people. It was all in a good cause.

Q: What about your relationship with the South African authorities in these various places?

NORLAND: Well, they were not welcome in these places. There was no official South African mission.

0099Q: Really? In none of them?

NORLAND: None. There were South African businessmen, South African spies, South African domination of the police force, as in Swaziland. They were functionaries behind the scenes. You'd have a sign that said: “Mr. Dlamini” (the most common name in Swaziland; almost everybody is a Dlamini); but behind the scenes was a South African.

Q: What were your relations with our embassy in Pretoria, Cape Town?

NORLAND: They were not always as smooth as could have been expected, they were naturally apprehensive that we might be having contact with ANC people. If the South African government found out about such contacts it would protest: “Why are your colleagues in Gaborone having contacts with these black terrorists?” So we were discreet, trying to minimize the problems for our colleagues.

We had our own interests. And we thought what we were doing was more in harmony with the overall U.S. policy objectives—namely, to encourage democratization, freedom of movement and expression, voting rights, that sort of thing. We didn't think we should be inhibited by always deferring to the South African government. After all, they were on the wrong side of these issues.

We had a lot of sentiment to overcome; for a long time, the American government was in bed with the South African government. We had various ambassadors out there, many of them political appointees, who felt that our future was with South Africa. Until very late, Kissinger felt that our future was with South Africa. He had such bad judgment on these issues. He really thought power was measured principally, if not exclusively, by force of arms, ignoring the ideas that have produced revolution around the world. And he still is a little slow to recognize those virtues.

Q: You were there three years, doing your rounds and all this. Then you moved to a real hot spot, didn't you?

NORLAND: Yes. For the record, I have to say that we had an inspection, in mid-'79. The head of the team was a friend of mine, who said, “Looking at this issue of whether we should have separate ambassadors to all three countries, rather than this multiple accreditation, what do you think?”

0100

My reply was, “If those assignments will go to career people, so that we can, in effect, give the experience to younger officers at the O-3 level...” We had done this before; we had had O-3 ambassadors in Rwanda...

Q: In the Persian Gulf...

NORLAND: In various places. “If we can use these posts as a training ground for young ambassadors, give them a chance to show that they can manage, that they can direct and coordinate programs, it would on balance, be a good thing.” Bernie Stokes was in Lesotho. Why not name Bernie or his successor as ambassador, give him the title? The same with Jim Wachob in Swaziland. They were mature people; they were in their fifties, experienced. They could have done it. “But,” I said, “if this should turn out to be a training ground for political ambassadors, then it would be an unfortunate development.”

I got assurances that said, “Don't worry. We think you're right; it's a good thing to show that these countries have come of age. Probably on balance, it wouldn't be any more expensive, and it may be even less expensive, to do it this way (name separate ambassadors).”

So I agreed. Two of the three countries were immediately given to political appointees, which cost the U.S. taxpayer enormously. Why? Because instead of having a relatively junior deputy—if Jim Wachob had been ambassador, for example, his deputy could have been a junior officer—we had to upgrade the deputy and move in somebody more experienced, at great expense to the U.S. government.

In the case of Swaziland, I'm pretty sure that this is true, a man came into the Department and asked where the Swiss Desk was. He thought he was going to Switzerland. He did not know the difference between Switzerland and Swaziland.

Q: Oh, God.

NORLAND: I suppose I couldn't have held out; after all, we're talking about only a little over a decade ago that you'd see an article on Southern Africa every two months in the U.S. press. And after Soweto, interest subsided again. Southern Africa was way off the scope of most Americans. That could have continued; on the other hand, I don't think it was fair not to prepare for the day that these countries were acknowledged as countries.

To be sure, Lesotho is surrounded by South Africa; whether that's a viable independent country is open to question. They've even begun to ask themselves whether they might not be integrated into a democratic South Africa, as probably will be the case in the next decade.

0101

Swaziland, on the other hand, is likely to remain independent. I don't want to leave the impression that it will be easy in Swaziland, because they also have a monarchical tradition.

The king of Lesotho has his own ideas, but he's virtually exiled now. He exiled himself in some respects. Moshoeshoe is his name, a younger man, probably forty-five.

The current king of Swaziland is Makhosetive Mswati III, born in 1968, represents a long tradition, and you can't obliterate monarchical tradition.

Having spent three years in the BLS countries, and having gotten the final year's extension on the strength that I'd been working hard and I'd made a lot of contacts and was building up programs, as the third year approached, they said, “You've had three good years, now we're going to put you through the mill.” And I didn't protest when they assigned me to Chad.

Q: It was sort of a bureau appointment.

NORLAND: Yes. I don't think anyone was competing to go to Chad. We hadn't had an ambassador there for six months or so.

Q: What were our interests in Chad, and what was the situation? We're talking about 1979 to '80, when you were there.

NORLAND: That's right. In 1979, our interests in Chad could be quickly summarized: Chad was Libya's neighbor, and Qadhafi was having a field day. He had been relatively successful economically in his own country, and was trying to do things to elevate himself to a position of importance in the world generally. He was a player in Middle Eastern affairs.

I maintain that the most understandable explanation of why Chad became important was Qadhafi's strategic goal of a Pan-African Islamic Community (PAIC). This theory has often been reported and I've never seen it refuted. There are other explanations but I contend that the PAIC explains much of what Qadhafi does. It's mystical and unreal. But he believes he has a role in uniting the Arab-speaking people of that region. And, of course, the region extends all across the Sahel. Qadhafi wouldn't stop at Chad or Niger. He's supported dissident movements in other countries as well.

Q: Messed in The Sudan.

0102

NORLAND: He has never failed to take an interest in The Sudan and messed it up as you say. He tried to help the north conquer the south, which antagonized the south and, in effect, exacerbated Sudan's civil war. But he's also helped dissident movements as far away as Senegal, or Mauritania and Gambia. Clearly, his fingerprints are on an attempt to overthrow the government of Gambia. It's hard to believe, but one is forced to take Qadhafi seriously.

And he has tremendous resources due to petroleum. The story of Occidental Oil is shocking. I'm sure you know it because we've got experts, like Jim Akins, who can tell you all about that. I've said, “Libya with its average per capita income of something like $7,000 is Chad's neighbor and has an average per capita income of something like $250. That disparity makes unrest and instability almost automatic.

For example, Qadhafi has supported every one of Chad's thirteen political parties, in one way or another. Whether they were from the south (which is to say, antagonistic to him), or Arabic-speaking in the north, he supported them in his efforts to destabilize the country and expand his influence.

Libya is a huge territory, but with only about three million people. Chad, the fifth-largest country on the continent, has some five million people, all but a couple hundred thousand in the south, where you have rivers and arable land. It was called le Chad utile, or the useful part of Chad. (That contrasts with the north, which was considered to be the useless part of Chad.) There was a dispute with Libya over the so-called Aozou strip, a band of about sixty miles wide along the frontier between Libya and Chad. Qadhafi thought he had the right to claim that territory, and legal disputes arose over its status. There were rumors it contained uranium.

Another interest in Chad was petroleum. When I arrived, there was a CONOCO operation centered about seventy-five miles northwest of the capital of N'Djamena. They had found oil and were ready to pump it. They had plans for a pipeline to take it to the outskirts of N'Djamena, where they were planning a mini-refinery. The production would be enough for Chad's internal needs. That would have been a tremendous gain for the country, not to have to buy petroleum products abroad. This was also a very important factor because it was an American company. (CONOCO was not just American; they had a French dimension to that whole operation.)

Other than the Libyan interest and this small American commercial interest, there was little to hold our attention in Chad.

Q: You were there during the end of the Carter term. Did we see this as a battleground between East and West?

NORLAND: Oh, yes. During the Carter years, I'll have to say that interest was not great. We were preoccupied by other events.

0103

I can give an example. On the 7th of November 1979, the Iranians took American hostages at our embassy in Tehran. That sensitized people to a whole new set of issues in the Middle East, including the influence of Khomeini and what we now call Islamic fundamentalism. We were in a sensitive position in N'Djamena, because Sudan was next door, and Sudan had become a minor ideological battleground. We were closely associated with Gaafar Nimeiri, the president of Sudan. Our aid reached some two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollars in the early '80s. That's a tremendous investment. We threatened to lose that investment if Qadhafi gained influence and there was talk about his outflanking Sudan. There were other strategic considerations. The Carter administration was on the defensive due to events in Tehran, so we were lying low.

Those events had their repercussions, the most important of which came in March of 1980. Hissen Habr� was the minister of defense in the government of President Goukouni, a person of limited experience and education. Habr� had three degrees from French universities; he was chafing at the idea that he was subordinate to this barely “literate” man from the north. So Habr� took up arms against Goukouni on March 20, 1980; fighting began in the streets of the N'Djamena, being the capital and the only infrastructure worth fighting about.

We holed up, and at the end of three days, we were urged to get out of there. The Department was afraid (I've been told subsequently) we might become the second group of American diplomats held hostage by unfriendly forces. The French still had about eight hundred soldiers stationed at the airfield on the outskirts of N'Djamena. They also had an effective emergency evacuation plan. After three days of shelling we were encouraged by radio (we had voice radio to Ghana) to get out of there. By this time a dozen people were camped in the residence. Late on one afternoon we got into cars and drove through the streets.

I have a copy of an article that my wife did that described that evacuation.

Q: If you'll give it to me, I'll make a copy of it and put it with your interview.

NORLAND: I'll be glad to do that.

We got out with no casualties. Very fortunate, because there was a lot of fighting going on. The city was in flames. Thanks to the French, we got to the airfield. And the next day, I was flown out on a French Trans-All to Douala, Cameroon, with my wife and three or four other embassy people. The French had things well organized, they could offer you the option of flying out or driving out. They had put a temporary bridge across the Logone River, a couple of miles from the city. So the defense attach� took the official car and drove out to Cameroon, where he used the car for many months.

0104

We got out, and that changed things. This becomes of some interest because the government that we left behind was still headed by Goukouni. He called on the French military, in May 1980 (it was March when we left), to withdraw, saying their presence disrupted efforts to reach a negotiated settlement. Hissen Habr� was still in the country in the south part of town. In June 1980, this same Goukouni turned to the Libyans and asked them for military assistance to help drive Habr� out of the country. And they succeeded in driving Habr� out in the fall of 1980.

By that time, we saw the Reagan administration coming. And the Reagan administration looked at this array of forces, and saw Goukouni, still the legitimate president, and remembered that he had called on Qadhafi to bail him out. And the Reagan regime decided to find an alternative to Goukouni.

This was an interesting “contra” movement.

But the point is that Goukouni, by the fall of '81, saw change building. The OAU (Organization of African Unity) people, as well as other outside influences, got to Goukouni and said, “Look, you're creating a serious confrontation with various countries, including the United States and France, by allowing Qadhafi to have this influence.” Libyan forces were actually occupying as far south as N'Djamena. They were almost co-responsible for government in N'Djamena, the capital.

I could provide further details on this, but the fact is that in late October of 1981, with Habr� driven out of the capital thanks to the cooperation of the Libyans, Goukouni turned to Qadhafi and said, “You have completed the mission for which I requested your assistance in June of 1980. Now please leave.” And Qadhafi left. Within two weeks, all Libyan forces were gone from Chad. Those forces had already become very unpopular, because, like any military occupying force, they act arrogantly and made themselves very unpopular. And they left.

By this time, however, the United States had decided to help Habr� return to Chad. He had taken refuge in Cameroon with about half of his military (we estimate maybe two or three thousand people) and in western Sudan where he was poised on the border. And about this time, American aid started to flow, the result of a Casey decision.

Q: That's William Casey of the CIA.

NORLAND: The CIA was deeply involved in the whole operation. Habr� was getting assistance directly and indirectly, i.e., the U.S. was replacing military equipment that the Sudanese and the Egyptians turned over to Habr�. We were, in effect, filling in behind these parties that we enlisted to support Habr�.

0105

I could show you clippings that show...

Q: Well, we're mainly concentrating on your time there.

NORLAND: Right, and this is the key point. This was the beginning of a contra operation, and it's the only successful one of the Reagan administration.

Q: You were there from when to when? You left in March of '80.

NORLAND: I left in '80, but I remained accredited to Chad for over a year.

Q: When did you arrive in Chad?

NORLAND: I arrived in Chad in November of 1979.

Q: So you had a very short...

NORLAND: Five months in country.

Q: What was your impression of the Chad government?

NORLAND: I arrived there just weeks after the first coalition government had been negotiated. It had been announced in August of 1979, thanks to the initiatives of the French. I was the last ambassador to deal directly with these parties: the president, Goukouni Oueddei; the minister of defense, Hissen Habr�; the vice president, Mr. Abdul Krden Kamougi; and the coalition. I was able to assess the strengths and weaknesses of these parties. And throughout the time that I was in the Department I was asked by Dick Moose, the assistant secretary, to monitor what was going on in Chad. So I kept fairly close tabs on what was happening, making recommendations, etc. I actually went to countries bordering on Chad, on a couple of occasions. I followed it very closely. And then, when the new administration came in...

Q: This would be the Reagan administration.

0106

NORLAND: The Reagan administration and Crocker came in. I was alert to the underhanded scheming. I asked what the new administration intended to do, and I was giving them my best advice. As a matter of fact, I have here some notes that I made at the time, and I thought I might quote from them.

Q: Yes, would you quote, please.

NORLAND: This is February 7, 1981, for a meeting with Assistant Secretary Crocker. The issue that I wanted to discuss was the support that was brewing for Habr� as the “preferred faction.” And I made a note to myself: “In my contributions, I have set forth pros and cons, always concluding that Habr� is the least desirable anti-Libyan faction.” I did agree that if the diplomatic options failed, we might return to Habr�, but that, for the time being, he was not popular and we should not support him. And I gave various reasons. I refer to the recurring references to support for Habr� as the preferred priority, by the Reagan administration. Under the heading of Aiding Anti-Libyan Factions I wrote: “I feel strongly that helping Habr� should be viewed as the least desirable expedient, one that should be undertaken only after the diplomatic option has been given at least several weeks to work itself out. There are two principal reasons. First, Habr� is the one prominent politician who has no political future in Chad.”

I should add that Habr�'s movement was unpopular because he had committed atrocities in the south in 1979, and was known for that. He could not travel in the country south of the capital because his forces were detested. Habr� was a guerrilla fighter, an excellent guerrilla fighter, but he was not a politician. He had no sense of compromise. He was an aristocrat. Incidentally, he came into power in Chad on the 10th of June 1982; he was thrown out on the 3rd of December 1990. When I heard that he had been thrown out, I understood why and had, in effect, anticipated it. Habr� could not govern except by brute force, and thus antagonized many people.

I tried to keep the Reagan administration from putting its eggs in the Habr� basket. I didn't succeed. And that's one of the reasons that I retired. I felt that I didn't want to be associated with this.

It was a misguided decision that cost the United States a total of perhaps a half-billion dollars to put Habr� into power and keep him there for eight years. And the costs are still coming in. We took responsibility for several hundred Libyans whom we're still supporting somewhere.

Q: It was a huge operation.

NORLAND: It was expensive. We brought in AWACS, because Libya...

0107

Q: AWACS being the Airborne Warning and Control System.

NORLAND: Airborne radar, exactly. Libya did provoke Chadians by sending its forces in the direction of N'Djamena, on several occasions. But it was the French who were called upon by the authorities, even Habr�, to return with the necessary armed force (including air forces) to repel the Libyans. Habr� did a good job in turning back those forces as well. In '87, for example, he conducted a daring raid to the north, across the border, and destroyed a lot of Libyan war materiel. That was daring; it was great...

Q: Just to finish up on this, could you tell a little about your experiences at the time of the fighting there, what happened and all.

NORLAND: Well, I'd be happy to talk about that. It was challenging.

I had contact with all three of the major political factions. I had made a point of calling on the Imam, the head of the mosque of N'Djamena, a huge establishment. The Saudis put in something like ten million dollars, twenty years ago, to build a really magnificent mosque. And when the fighting loomed in March 1980, when it appeared that there was going to be an outbreak of fighting, I made the rounds or telephoned to these factions. I went to see the Imam. Because I didn't speak Arabic well enough, I took a local employee as interpreter. I was trying to warn them all that for a country struggling for survival (because Chad really was in very bad shape economically), it was folly for whatever reason to allow their country to become an arena of armed competition. They had developed certain qualities of tolerance but from the time of independence in 1960, there had been terrible mistakes made. Now that the Front for the National Liberation of Chad (FROLINAT) had taken control of the country, a new government had won the day, and it was time to focus on economic development. This was my line to everybody who would listen.

One of the specific arguments that I used at every step was to point out that this little oil well was close to operation in the north. The World Bank loan would make possible the pipeline and the mini-refinery hinged provided they could reach some kind of a peaceful agreement. But this would not go forward if there was continued fighting. No one would want to invest, no one would be able to work. That was one of the points I kept raising in the dialogue that preceded the final outbreak of fighting: that you don't have the luxury of fighting out your differences; you have to compromise.

Goukouni had willingly made one concession. In the agreement that brought him to power, the agreement of August 1979, he said, “I agree to have elections in eighteen months.”

0108

That was a fair arrangement. Why couldn't Habr� have waited for those elections? Why did he have to take to the streets?

One of the reasons, I'm sure (in addition to the psychological reason that he just could not bear, with all of his education, to be under the domination of what he called this “illiterate” from the north), was that he was getting psychological support from the United States.

We can understand this only by using a great deal of imagination. What made the United States think that this little arena of Cold War competition was so important that we should actually depose the country's president? A president I was accredited to. He was also the president with more legitimacy than any other political figure because he had been brought to power by political dialogue.

Q: Were we working to depose him before the outbreak of...

NORLAND: No, not before the outbreak...

Q: But at the time of the outbreak, what happened at the embassy?

NORLAND: We closed up the embassy on, I think it was, a Thursday evening, fully expecting to go back to work on Friday morning. The fighting broke out about four in the morning.

The military attach�, Jim Herrick, lived close by. He was sensible enough to rush down to the embassy and get out a vehicle parked in front of the embassy and brought it back to the residence. He reported something was going on. We shouldn't even try to open the offices.

We had a radio system and had practiced our E&E (emergency and evacuation) procedures. We got on the radio and ordered everyone to, “Stand fast, stay where they are. No movement.”

We had a couple of people who couldn't bear to just sit and listen, and tried to go out in the streets. Fighting came close and they retreated. Then the warring parties started shooting off Stalin organs, as they're called.

Q: Yes. rockets, cartouches.

NORLAND: Exactly. The rockets hit one of the houses next to one of our embassy employees. They panicked and came without incident, to the residence. We gradually picked up more and more people, who took shelter in the residence.

0109

Jim Bullington, deputy chief of mission at the time, was a radio ham. In addition, we had a pretty good single-side-band radio. We started communicating by radio, because we couldn't get to the embassy. Telephones didn't work for long distance calls. So we established a kind of a radio post upstairs in the residence.

Because the shooting came very close by, we started to develop a “defense perimeter” within the residence, bringing mattresses under a stairwell, and putting the mattresses in positions whereby shrapnel might be embedded.

Then Habr�, in whose area we were sitting, in what I'm sure was a conscious move, brought a Stalin-organ operation into our backyard. Rockets would shoot off toward Goukouni's forces about a mile north; of course, Goukouni answered, and so we had a couple of shells land in the garden, not far from Habr�'s Stalin organ. As long as Habr� had that arm there, he no doubt thought it would give him some kind of immunity, i.e. being near the American ambassador's residence. We knew Goukouni was poorly organized, that his forces were not sharpshooters and not able to hit his target so we had to take special precautions.

Then it became a waiting game. Loud noises that would go on almost all hours of the night. There'd usually be a lull between midnight and four-thirty or so. It was an awful sound. Have you ever heard a Stalin organ?

Q: No, I never have.

NORLAND: It's a loud whoosh. And that got on people's nerves. I have to say that nobody panicked. We waited, we communicated with the Department. And we received urgent messages: “Get out. Don't waste any time.” We had to call back and say, “Look, the streets are not passable.” The Chadians had a wonderful cathedral built entirely of wood. The cathedral was torched. It was located on the square next to the embassy. We knew what was going on. Wooden stadium benches had been torched. And so you couldn't drive downtown; there were electric wires all over the town. We just had to sit there. It's a helpless feeling.

But we managed to hold out. We communicated with the French, who said, “We're trying to get a cease-fire. We'll let you know. Be prepared to leave. Develop your strategy.”

One of the strategies, for example, was to get broom handles and tie sheets on them, so when the time came, we could hold these out the window as a white flag, a sign we were neutral. We had not taken sides; we were very careful to observe neutrality, not allowing any Habr� people into our compound, trying to reassure all parties.

0110

And I was on the phone (I have notes from this period, fifteen or twenty phone calls that I made notes on) to these various parties: to Habr�, to Goukouni, to the Imam, to Kamouge. I was shouting into the phone, which fortunately worked right up to the last, saying, “You're destroying your country. This is irresponsible. You're going to lose every promising economic development project, including the hope of exploiting your oil reserves, which are your future.” And I used every argument I could think of.

Of course, they replied with sounds that were not at all encouraging. I feared for the worst. They weren't returning phone calls later on. Habr� was eager to get into this battle; he thought he could take over.

This had started on Friday morning. By Sunday afternoon, we got word from the French that they expected a cease-fire, that the parties were exhausted, and that we should be ready to move at any time.

We had three vehicles in our courtyard at this point. We had our brooms and sheets ready. We made a little initial dash out at one point. A couple of people got out and started to get in the car when a bullet winged the rim of the wheel, and knocked it off. We thought, “God, if that had hit the tire, we'd have had a flat tire.” We returned to the residence, then came back about thirty minutes later.

We got word still that a convoy of French civilians would be coming by our gate in about fifteen minutes. Everybody was authorized to take one suitcase. The French had said they wouldn't accept more than one bag on the aircraft or at the evacuation center. So we all had a bag. Five people, I guess, in the car, and we took our place in the convoy of vehicles. There were probably fifteen cars, French interspersed with some other nationalities. And we drove slowly through town, with this wreckage all around—it was awful—including, of course, our own embassy, which had taken a couple of miserable hits, the facade crashed in.

We had the misfortune of not being able to burn everything at the embassy. We also had the misfortune of having had an exercise where we had burned down to the prescribed thirty-minutes' burn, but our Agency friends had not carried out their part of it. So we had a lingering problem for several months as a result of concern as to what might have been captured in the way of documentation. We feared that Goukouni might have made the information available to the Libyans. And so we did have a festering problem there for a while, but we couldn't do anything about it.

0111

If the Agency had been honest... They had two very incompetent people there at the time. They were deceptive. One of them has been fired, I'm happy to say, and the other is wandering somewhere, having divorced his wife. They thought they were being clever by not doing what they were supposed to do. And, as a result, I don't know what happened. I've never had any evidence that anything was found by the Libyans or the Chadians that has embarrassed us. But there was concern. The Agency was concerned. And they didn't believe me when I told them that it was in large measure their own station's fault that led to this problem.

Anyway, we drove by the embassy; we drove by the burning cathedral, the burning grandstand steps, burning houses and wires across the street and soldiers wandering aimlessly with their guns at ready. But they respected our white flags, and we got as far as the French Embassy, where the ambassador was in the process of reforming these convoys and sending us the last mile to the airport. After a half an hour of discussion and deciding the priorities and conditions, we made the last run. Once we got on the air base, it was a perimeter that the French were ready to defend. And we had quarters in what amounted to barracks.

I'll never forget that night. They invited us to dinner, and there at dinner was a bottle of wine. That's the French!

Q: Oh, gosh. Well, then, in the end, you retired in '81. What have you been doing since that time?

NORLAND: Well, I retired because I really felt there was no future in this new administration. I had had no success with Crocker, who only got approved, you know, in June of '81. He was held hostage by Jesse Helms.

Q: A senator from North Carolina, very conservative, who had his own agenda.

NORLAND: That's right, who apparently said, “I will not approve Crocker until you give me authority to make a deputy assistant secretary position available to someone of my choice.” Such is, at least, what I've always heard.

And the atmosphere was just very poor. That whole Haig business.

Q: Alexander Haig.

NORLAND: Yes, the secretary. And the Casey influence. I have these documents that show that I was consistent in saying, “Don't support Habr�, he is not a popular political leader, he's a guerrilla leader.” They ignored my advice, so I went back.

0112

I retired to the only house that I owned at the time, a house we had built while I was in Botswana located on a lake in New Hampshire. We thought it was an ideal place to get away from Washington, and the tropics, even Africa. We built it at a place called Eastman, near the town of Grantham, twenty miles from downtown Hanover, New Hampshire. And we moved up there. It was a winterized place. I did some articles; I did some consulting. I was asked to go to Norway, for example, to meet with a group of Shell Oil people who were plotting the future: what should they be doing in the Eighties? I went on speaking trips to West Africa as an AMPART. Do you know the AMPART program?

Q: Oh, yes.

NORLAND: Lecturing on U.S. policy toward Africa, on U.S. foreign policy, on our policy toward Southern Africa. In 1983 I went to the Center for International Affairs at Harvard for several meetings, and they asked me if I would sign on as a fellow at the CFIA, a prestigious organization that focuses on foreign policy. And from '84 to '87, I gave lectures there, ran a course at the JFK Institute of Politics a couple of blocks away. I lectured, recruited, I taught a course at a community college. I was reading widely. My aim at this time was to consolidate my Foreign Service experience. I had been running pretty fast and hard, and I hadn't really had a chance to do a lot of reading and thinking that I thought was relevant. I enjoyed that.

But by '84, my wife was not at all happy in the New Hampshire woods. It was rural, and she used to say, “My only companions are the dripping pine trees.” She was glad to go to Boston. We lived in Cambridge for three years, '84 to '87. I did these academic things. I made several trips to Africa as a speaker. And I went to Norway for a month. My son was then in Tromso. Enjoyed that.

In '87 we decided that we'd had enough of Cambridge. We had two sons in the Foreign Service. Their base was Washington, and we decided to come down here. Our daughter was also here. We found an apartment in the Westchester, moved here in July of '87 and have been here ever since. For three years I ran the Africa Studies Program at the Foreign Service Institute.

At the end of '89, I left and, for a year, was the program director for the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), which is funded by the Congress of the United States, through USIA and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The idea of CIPE is to strengthen the pro-free-market lobby everywhere in the world. I was in charge of trying to identify existing nuclei of Chambers or think tanks with people who would lobby for a free market system. The aim was to provide guidance for elected officials, and show them, “Look, here is a vested interest that has the prosperity of the nation at heart. And you should do what you can to protect and enhance and strengthen these private-sector interests.” So I did that for a year, until '91.

0113

Since '91, I've been doing consulting. I worked for some time with a group trying to renew U.S. investment in South Africa. That has not proven productive, as you know.

I'm an associate with a group called Export Marketing Associates. After some months of surveying the ground, we have some very promising contacts in the Middle East.

And I was elected in '91 to be a member of the governing board of the American Foreign Service Association, and a member of the editorial board, last year, of the Foreign Service Journal.